How to choose fleet management software: a buyer's checklist

Fleet management software looks much the same from one vendor to the next: a map with vehicles, a list of alerts, a page of reports. The differences show later, when a tracker stops reporting, a driver asks what you can see at the weekend, or a report gives a fuel figure that nobody can explain. This checklist gives you the questions that reveal those differences before you sign.

It is written for owners, fleet managers and dispatchers of small and mid-sized fleets in the Balkans and the EU, and it names no vendor. At the end, we give our own answers for Fleet Hero, including its limits.

1. Start with the jobs, not the features

Write down the things the software must do every week, and who will do them. Typical jobs are:

• See where every vehicle is, and which ones are idle, stopped or not reporting.
• Find out where a vehicle was on a given day, and who drove it.
• Be told when something needs attention: a vehicle leaves a zone, a fuel level drops, a service is due.
• Keep insurance, registrations, licences and services from expiring unnoticed.
• Give managers the figures they ask for, without building spreadsheets by hand.
• Meet the driving-time and tachograph rules that apply to your trucks and vans.

Then put them in order of importance. A ranked list makes a demo far more useful than a tour of every menu.

2. Trackers and installation

The software can only show what the tracker sends. Ask which devices the vendor supports and what each one will read in your vehicles, not in general.

• Plug-in trackers go into the diagnostic (OBD) socket of cars and vans. They are quick to fit and to move, and can read data such as the mileage where the vehicle provides it.
• Hard-wired trackers are fitted out of sight and connected to power and the ignition. They are harder to remove and suit vehicles that stay in the fleet for years.
• Trackers with a CAN or FMS connection read the vehicle's own data, such as fuel level, odometer and engine figures, where the vehicle supports it.
• Truck trackers wired to the tachograph can show the driver cards and the driving time live, if the software uses that data.

Ask too whether you buy the trackers or pay for them inside the monthly fee, who installs them, what installation costs per vehicle, and whether the SIM card and mobile data are included. If you already have trackers, ask whether they can stay and what it takes to move them over.

3. Data you can trust

• Update interval: how often a moving vehicle reports its position, and whether a faster interval costs more.
• History: how many months of routes you keep, and what happens to older data.
• Stale data: how the map shows a vehicle that has stopped reporting. A map that stops updating without saying so misleads the people who rely on it.
• Gaps: what a tracker does without mobile signal, and whether the missing part of a route arrives later or is drawn as a straight line.
• Readings: whether fuel, odometer and fault codes appear with names and units, or as raw numbers.

4. Alerts that reach the right people

Every system has alerts. What matters is whether they reach the right person, through a channel that works today.

• Which alert types exist, and which of them your trackers can feed. An alert that needs data your trackers do not send will never fire.
• Which channels work now, such as in-app notifications, e-mail or a webhook to your own systems, and which are only planned.
• Whether you can see who will be notified before you save a rule, and send a test.
• Whether quiet hours and repeat limits prevent a flood of messages at night.

5. Reports you can check

• Which reports are ready to use, and whether they export to PDF, Excel and CSV.
• Whether reports can be e-mailed on a schedule, and to whom.
• Whether a figure says how it was measured. Fuel used can come from the engine's counter, from the tank level or from the fill-ups you enter, and the results differ.
• Whether missing data is shown as missing, or quietly as zero.

6. Tachographs and driving time

If you run trucks, or vans that now need a tachograph for international work, ask three separate questions, because the answers are often given as one:

1. Does the system show live tachograph data, such as the driver card and the driving time left, and which trackers and tachographs does that need?
2. Does it download driver-card and vehicle-unit files remotely, and how often? EU rules require downloads at least every 28 days for driver cards and every 90 days for vehicle units.
3. Does it analyse those files for infringements, and under which rules: Regulation (EC) No 561/2006, or the AETR for journeys that run partly outside the EU?

Ask also whether the driving-time figures come from the tachograph itself or are estimated from GPS. Estimates can help with planning, but they are not a legal record.

7. Company cars and driver privacy

Tracking a vehicle also tracks the person who drives it. The Article 29 Working Party of EU data protection authorities said, in its opinion on data processing at work, that where private use of a company vehicle is allowed, the employee should in principle be able to switch location tracking off for a while when the circumstances justify it, such as a visit to a doctor, and that tracking a vehicle outside agreed working hours is unlikely to have a legal basis. Drivers must also be told that a tracker is installed.

• Can a driver or a manager pause tracking for private trips, and is every pause recorded?
• During a private trip, are the positions discarded, or only hidden from the map?
• Can you limit who sees which vehicles and which drivers' details?
• Can you tell drivers what is recorded about them, and for how long it is kept?

8. Users, roles and security

• Can you create your own roles, and limit each user to certain vehicles or vehicle groups?
• Is there an audit log of who changed what, and when?
• Where are the servers, and who can reach your data?
• If the vendor names a certification, ask for the certificate and its scope.

9. Language and local fit

• Can every user, from dispatcher to driver, work in their own language, including Cyrillic or Latin script where needed?
• Do PDFs and e-mails reach each reader in their language?
• Are invoices issued with VAT, in the currency you need?
• In which languages and at what hours is support available?

10. Price and contract terms

Compare the total cost over the contract, not only the headline price per vehicle.

• What the monthly price includes: the SIM and mobile data, users, history, alerts and reports.
• Which features belong to which package, and what an upgrade costs.
• What trackers, installation and training cost, and when they are paid.
• The minimum term, the notice period, and what happens when you sell a vehicle.
• Whether you can take your data with you when you leave, and in which format.

11. Test it on your own vehicles

A demo with sample data shows the screens. A test with a few of your own vehicles shows whether the readings you need really arrive. Before you decide:

1. Fit or connect trackers in two or three typical vehicles, including the most complex one.
2. Check the readings you care about, such as fuel level, odometer and fault codes, against the dashboard.
3. Set up the alerts you would use first, and send each one a test.
4. Run the reports your managers ask for, and export them.
5. Ask a dispatcher and a driver to use the system for a week, and listen to what they say.

Questions to ask every vendor

1. Which trackers do you support, and what will each one read in our vehicles?
2. Which of the features you showed us are available today, and which are planned?
3. Which alert channels work today?
4. How do your reports show estimated or missing values?
5. Do you show live tachograph data, download tachograph files or analyse them, and which of the three do we get?
6. How does private use of company cars work in your system?
7. Where are your servers, and who can see our data?
8. What is included in the price per vehicle, and what costs extra?
9. How do we get our data out if we leave?

How Office Hero answers these questions

We wrote this checklist, so here are our own answers for Fleet Hero, the fleet management app of Office Hero, including where it stops.

• Trackers: Teltonika trackers for cars, vans and trucks, configured by our team. You buy the trackers, from €65, and the M2M SIM and mobile data are included in every package.
• Data: positions every 60, 30 or 10 seconds, depending on the package, and a map that says which vehicles are not reporting. Location history is not yet deleted automatically after a set period; ask us to remove history you no longer need.
• Alerts: 21 built-in alert types, each showing whether your trackers send the data it needs. Alerts arrive in the app and by e-mail to colleagues, and the Business package adds signed webhooks to your own systems.
• Reports: 14 ready-made reports in PDF, Excel and CSV. In the vehicle summary, estimated and missing figures are marked as such.
• Tachographs: live driver cards and driving time with a tracker wired to the tachograph. Fleet Hero does not download or analyse tachograph files.
• Privacy: a privacy pause that discards positions instead of hiding them, with private windows that can be booked in advance. Out of the box, only administrators and fleet managers can pause recording.
• Languages and servers: 15 interface languages, machine-translated, with native review in progress, and servers in Skopje, North Macedonia.
• Price: from €10.80 per vehicle per month, excluding VAT, with annual billing 10% lower.
• Your data: reports export to PDF, Excel and CSV, and our team prepares a full export of your company's data on request.

Fleet Hero is part of the Office Hero suite, with HR Hero and Finance Hero on the same account, and each driver shares one record with HR Hero. Compare the packages on the pricing page, or book a demo and ask us these questions about your own fleet.