What fleet management software is really for
Fleet management software gets sold on maps. Little van icons moving across a city look great in a demo. But the questions a finance director or operations manager actually asks are duller. Which vehicles cost too much to run? Is anyone’s fuel card being used for their own car? Which van is overdue for a service, and whose job was it to book it?
Those are ERP questions. The data sits in purchase invoices, fuel card statements and odometer readings. It only needs to meet in one place.
What’s already in ERPNext and Odoo
In ERPNext, the Vehicle DocType holds make, model, registration, insurance details and last odometer, and Delivery Trip uses it for routes. Vehicle Log, which now lives in the HRMS app, records odometer, fuel and service costs and can raise an Expense Claim for the driver. It’s a decent base that stops short of fuel cards, consumption checks and distance-based reminders.
In Odoo, the Fleet app is part of Community. It has fleet.vehicle, vehicle models, contracts with renewal alerts, services and fleet.vehicle.odometer. Odoo dropped its dedicated fuel log several versions back, so fill-ups usually end up recorded as services. That works, but it’s awkward to report on. The snippet on this page adds a proper fuel log model instead.
Neither platform tries to be a telematics system. We don’t think it should.
What erpfly writes goes in its own Frappe app or Odoo addon. Custom fields ship as fixtures or model inheritance, the import lives in its own DocType or model with a clear log of which rows matched, and reminders run as scheduled jobs rather than someone’s calendar. Nothing touches core files, so the standard Fleet or Vehicle screens keep working after an upgrade.
Worked example: 26 vehicles and a fuel card statement
A regional distributor runs 22 vans and 4 rigid trucks. Every van has a fuel card. The card provider emails a CSV each Monday with around 150 lines.
The office uploads it. Each line matches a vehicle by card number. Two lines don’t match, because a card was replaced last week, so those two wait for someone to assign them. That takes a minute.
Van 14 normally averages 11 litres per 100 km. Its latest fill was 60 litres after 400 km, which is 15 L/100 km. The flag threshold is 25% above its own 90 day average, so 13.75. It’s over. The fleet coordinator gets a ToDo with the last three fill-ups attached. Maybe a tyre is soft. Maybe the card went on a family trip. Either way, somebody looks this week, not at year end.
Meanwhile the scheduled job notices van 6 is at 44,100 km with its last service at 30,000. That’s 900 km short of the 15,000 km interval and inside the 1,000 km warning, so the coordinator gets a reminder to book the workshop. Truck 2’s insurance ends in 30 days and the renewal reminder goes out the same night.
At the end of the quarter the cost report does the arithmetic the coordinator used to do by hand. Van 14 covered 9,800 km. Fuel came to $2,100, repairs to $640 and lease payments to $1,350. That’s $4,090, or about 42 cents a kilometre. The fleet average is lower, and now there’s a reason to ask whether van 14 should be the next one replaced.
Things we’d talk you out of
Rebuilding the tracker inside your ERP, for a start. Live positions every 30 seconds will bloat your database and duplicate a product you already pay for. Pull daily totals and move on.
Route optimisation is its own discipline. If you need it, buy a routing tool and send the resulting trips into the ERP.
And if you have three company cars, you don’t need fleet software at all. A recurring calendar reminder and a folder of receipts will do.
Where fleet data flows next
Vehicles are assets first, so the purchase, depreciation and disposal side belongs in asset management. Driver fuel receipts and tolls that don’t go on a card end up in expense management. Companies running vans for deliveries should read our notes on logistics businesses, which cover delivery trips and proof of delivery.
Running Odoo and want the fuel log added to your current Fleet setup? See how we approach Odoo customization.