Fleet management in Dolibarr: what each van really costs

The van is a 2019 panel van with 214,000 kilometres on it. It has been in the fleet since new, it does the same route five days a week, and last month it cost the company 1,840 EUR. The owner knows that number because it is in the spreadsheet. What the owner cannot say is why the same van cost 1,240 EUR in March, and when the accountant asks which of the six vans is actually earning its keep, the spreadsheet has no answer. It has a column of fuel invoices and a total at the bottom.

The problem is not the arithmetic. The problem is what never made it into the column. The insurance was paid in one go in January, so January looks terrible and the other eleven months look fine. The second set of tyres went on in April and the invoice is in a folder in the office. The leasing payment leaves the bank account on the first of the month and has never been written down anywhere, because nobody thinks of it as a cost. The service in June came with a hire van for three days, and that invoice sits with the customer's paperwork.

Add those four things and the month changes shape. That is the gap this article is about: fleet management in a small business is usually a spreadsheet that adds up fuel and a memory that holds everything else. The memory belongs to one person, and that person is on holiday in the week the insurance renews.

Why summing up fuel is not a fleet cost

Fuel is one line in the cost of a vehicle, and after the third year it is rarely the line that decides whether the vehicle is worth keeping. A sheet that stops at fuel measures the easiest thing to measure, which is why so many small fleets end up with a number that looks precise and means very little. What the sheet measures is the cost of the diesel, not the cost of the van.

Fuel is also a smooth cost. It arrives every week, in similar amounts, and it rewards the person who keeps filling in the row. Everything else is lumpy. Insurance renews once a year and lands in a single month. Tyres come in sets of four or six, at intervals that depend on the route and on the driver. Scheduled servicing follows the manufacturer's interval, in kilometres or in months, whichever arrives first, and the invoice carries parts, labour and sometimes a replacement vehicle for a week. Road tax is annual. A repair after a kerb strike can arrive in any month at all, and a claim can take half a year to settle.

When one month shows 1,840 EUR and the next shows 640 EUR, nobody learns anything from the difference except that the calendar is uneven. Divide by kilometres and the picture moves again, because a van that did 4,000 kilometres in a quiet month and one that did 9,000 in a busy month are not comparable until the cost is expressed per kilometre or per month. Without a common denominator, ranking six vans is guesswork dressed as data.

There is a second cost to doing this in a spreadsheet: the work of assembling it. At year end somebody sits with the fuel export, the broker's emails, the tyre invoices and the bank statement, and produces a figure that will be wrong in at least one direction. That afternoon is a real cost, paid in hours, even though it appears in no column and nobody invoices it to the vans.

What fleet management software should track

Fleet management software should hold two things for every vehicle, the dates that can stop it and the money it spends, and turn both into a cost figure for a period you choose.

In EasyFleet each vehicle has its own record, and the record carries the expiry dates that stop work in daily operation: the periodic technical inspection, the insurance policy, the tachograph where the vehicle has one, road tax and any service intervals you set yourself. Each date has an email reminder, and the reminder can go out daily, weekly or monthly, because three vans in one yard and a fleet split across two branches do not need the same rhythm. When an inspection or an insurance policy shows as expired, the vehicle is blocked in the module, so whoever assigns the next job sees it before the van leaves the yard instead of after the paperwork comes back.

The same record holds the mileage, the tyres by position, the insurance policies and any claims, and the expenses that fit nowhere else. Tyres by position earn their place: a front left that wears twice as fast as the rest says something about alignment or about how the van is driven, and you only notice if the position is written down.

Fuel is where the arithmetic pays for itself. Enter any two of litres, amount and price per litre, and the module calculates the third, which removes the small errors that spread through a year of manual entry. Real consumption is only calculated between full tanks, and a partial fill is flagged as partial instead of being averaged in and quietly corrupting the figure. The fuel card statement can be imported rather than retyped, so a month of fills arrives in one go.

Out of all that comes cost per vehicle and period, with an expense breakdown chart that shows where the money went without anyone building a pivot table. Multi-company with branches is supported, which matters when the same owner runs two depots and wants to know which one is expensive.

The driver app and the QR card are not the same thing

The driver app is for the person driving. They log kilometres, fuel and expenses from the phone, and it works without a signal, which is the normal condition of a loading bay in a basement or a car park at the edge of a village. The vehicle QR code is for everyone else: it is printed on a card that stays in the vehicle, and whoever finds it, a yard attendant, a customer's security guard, someone who has to move the van out of the way, scans it and lands on a public page you configure. You decide what appears there. Driver data never appears on that page.

Keeping the two apart is not a technical nicety. The driver needs to write, quickly, with one hand while holding a delivery note. The person with the QR code needs to read one line and find one phone number. A single screen built for both would be clumsy at each.

When EasyFleet is not what you need

EasyFleet does not plan routes, does not invoice freight and reads nothing from the vehicle's electronics, so if those are the jobs you need done, this is the wrong module.

There is no route optimisation, no delivery sequencing and no freight invoicing. There is no GPS tracking and no telematics: the module does not know where a van is, and it does not pull fault codes or live mileage from the engine. Mileage is entered, by the driver or by whoever closes the month, not read from a device.

It does not replace an accountant either. It organises the records and gives you a defensible cost per vehicle; the year end, the tax treatment and the judgement calls still belong to a person. And if you run two vans, fill up on one card and already know what each one costs, a folder and a calendar may be enough. The module starts to pay for the work it saves once the number of vehicles or the number of dates passes the point where one person can hold it all in their head.

Try it before you decide

The demo is open, so you can see the module working with invented data before paying anything. Sign in at the EasyFleet demo with the user demo and the password demo, and click around. Nothing to install and no form to fill in. The data is fictional, so you can break it without consequence.

What it costs and how to start

EasyFleet costs 290 EUR plus VAT (350.90 EUR including VAT), paid once, and the price includes 365 days of updates. Version 1.0.2 runs on Dolibarr 16 to 24, with PHP 7.4 to 8.5 on MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, and it is translated into eight languages. The full description is on the landing page at https://easysoft.es/es/gestion-flota-dolibarr/, the module page is https://easysoft.es/es/productos/easyfleet/, and the documentation lives in the public guides collection on https://wiki.easysoft.es under DOLIBARR, MODULOS, EASYFLEET.