How The Bug Master Mastered Multi-Channel Data with Fleetio and Coast

There’s a lot of information that flows into and out of fleet operations, from maintenance and inspections to fuel expenses and other budgetary items. And keeping track of all of those individual metrics can become a pretty heavy lift for a lot of fleets. For Austin-based pest control company The Bug Master, managing all of its trucks across its three Texas locations, and the data associated with them, had become “a little tricky,” as owner Dauphin Ewart put it, especially when it came to tracking fuel card interactions.

“[With our prior fuel card provider], the card generally associates with a vehicle, and that can cause a lot of operational confusion, because it’s very easy for cards to end up in the wrong vehicle,” Ewart said. “Then it makes your reporting very difficult to maintain accuracy… all of your data around fuel attribution just became a mess.”

When The Bug Master transitioned to their new provider, Coast, they were able to eliminate the confusion and liability that can come with individual fuel cards and manage all of their fuel transactions associated with drivers’ phone numbers and license plates. It was also incredibly easy to deploy, according to Ewart, and being able to quickly associate purchases with a distinct phone number and license plate has helped the fleet better attribute where their fuel money is going, and even restrict theft possibilities.

“There’s a lot of components of doing our job and getting gas is a pretty small one of them,” Ewart said. “I want that to be easy and seamless for my team, but also give me the control so that I know what the transactions are and so that financially I have the information I need, and Coast makes both of those things very easy to pull off.”

In addition to being a better solution for tracking fuel data individually, Coast also proved incredibly helpful because it directly integrated with Fleetio, The Bug Master’s fleet management platform of choice. Fleetio serves as the company’s single centralized dashboard for all of The Bug Master’s fleet data, so they can see historical maintenance data alongside fuel data from Coast and other important fleet touchpoints.

While Fleetio is The Bug Master’s ultimate “source of truth,” according to Ewart, having more accurate fuel data flowing in from Coast has helped the company be sure that what they’re seeing in their dashboard accurately reflects what’s actually happening in the fleet.

“Instead of logging into all these different portals, we’ve got one place with really good data that tells us what we need to know so that we can make the decisions that we need to make regarding fleet,” Ewart said. “What Coast brings to that table is the data accuracy. That just the process of using Coast means that the information that’s going into Fleetio is correct. It’s accurate. It’s usable. You can trust it. Anybody who uses data knows the most important thing about data is its accuracy.”