Million-Dollar Finance Systems or Fleet Spreadsheets?
Local governments invest heavily in corporate finance systems—often running into the millions—to ensure financial integrity, auditability and compliance. These systems are designed to be the single source of truth for asset valuation, cost attribution, depreciation, and capital planning.
Yet when it comes to fleet management, councils frequently rely on manually maintained spreadsheets—often created and updated by operational staff with limited system access—to fill the gaps left by finance and corporate systems not designed for fleet-specific needs.
With the two systems operating side by side, neither are complete. This raises a critical question: who do we trust to provide the data that informs million-dollar procurement decisions, annual capital budgets, and whole-of-life cost assessments?
The Problem: Misalignment Between System Investment and Operational Reality
Finance/corporate systems are built for accounting, not for real-time operational tracking of fuel usage, service schedules, telematics, or vehicle utilisation. Fleet spreadsheets, on the other hand, evolve out of necessity—providing some level of visibility over assets, but without audit trails, controls or integration. Reconciliation between the two is time-consuming, error-prone and often reactive. It leads to confusion over which system is authoritative and undermines confidence in reporting making executive oversight next to impossible.
The Risk: Decision-Making Based on Compromised Data
When spreadsheets become the de facto source of fleet data, councils expose themselves to outdated or inconsistent data used in budget forecasts and capital works planning. There are also missed opportunities for business improvement and cost optimisation. Staff maintaining multiple data sources for the same asset class is duplication of effort, prone to error and a waste of time, which could be spent better on strategic management of fleet assets. Spreadsheets lack version control, data lineage, or system verification, creating audit risk for councils. All this while millions of dollars have been spent on enterprise systems that are not leveraged to their full capability and do not meet day-to-day fleet management needs.
The Solution: Integration and Empowerment
Instead of choosing between flawed options, councils must bridge the divide by integrating fleet management platforms with core finance/corporate systems to eliminate duplication and improve trust in data. Fleet managers need to be empowered with access, training and systems that allow them to manage their budgets and report performance to contribute meaningfully to financial planning. There is a need to eliminate spreadsheets as a primary source of operational truth, retaining them only as a tactical tool—not a structural workaround.
The Bottom Line
It is not a matter of trusting spreadsheets or finance systems—it is about ensuring the right data is captured at the right point in the process, by the right people, using the right systems. Until councils make that investment, they will continue to undermine the very governance they seek to uphold.
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