Plumbing and heating businesses are operationally complex, with multiple engineers, vans and jobs scattered across postcodes. Yet many owners still run fleets on instinct and a phone full of missed messages. That lack of real-time visibility is quietly costing money – often enough to turn a healthy year into a tight one, according to Hein Du Plessis, CEO of FleetHive.ai.
Ask most plumbing and heating business owners what their fleet is costing them, and you will get a figure. It will be wrong. Not because they are careless – they are not – but because the real cost of running commercial vehicles is not a single line on a P&L statement. It is the sum of a dozen things nobody is actively watching: the engineer who idles for forty minutes waiting for a parking space, the van that ran a hundred miles more last month than the month before and nobody noticed, the fuel card that came back with a receipt that does not match the job sheet, the call from a customer at 11am asking where the engineer is and nobody on the desk knowing the answer.
Adding up
None of these is a disaster on its own. Collectively, they are a drain that runs constantly and silently, and in a business operating on margins of 8-15%, that drain matters.
According to the RAC Foundation’s analysis of commercial vehicle operating costs, and benchmarking data published by the Fleet News Annual Fleet Industry Survey, small trade businesses with no active fleet oversight consistently spend between 15% and 22% more on fuel per vehicle than those with basic monitoring in place.
That is not a marginal efficiency gain – for a five-van operation, it is the difference between a profitable year and a tight one. For example, a five‑van heating firm we worked with tracked a 17% drop in fuel spend and a 12% rise in billable hours within six months of introducing simple visibility dashboards – enough to move the business from break‑even to profitable.
“Fleet visibility does not eliminate the complexity of running a plumbing and heating business. But it replaces guesswork with information.”
Specific to the sector
The nature of plumbing and heating work makes fleet visibility more important, and harder to maintain, than in almost any other trade. A heating engineer responding to a boiler breakdown is not following a predictable route. A plumbing team dealing with an emergency callout is not running to schedule. A ventilation contractor fitting on a commercial site is managing access windows, materials deliveries, and subcontractors simultaneously. The variable, reactive, multi-site nature of this work means that without real-time fleet visibility, a business owner is making operational decisions based on whatever the last phone call told them – which is often incomplete, always retrospective, and sometimes simply wrong.
This matters beyond fuel. Commercial customers – housing associations, facilities managers, local authorities – increasingly expect documented proof of attendance, accurate arrival windows, and audit trails for compliance purposes. The days of ‘he’ll be there between 8 and 12’ are functionally over in that part of the market. If your engineers cannot demonstrate when they arrived and what they did, you will lose those contracts to firms that can. The barrier is not technical capability. It is operational visibility.
Visible fleet
This is not a pitch for expensive technology – and it is worth being direct about why many business owners have tried fleet tools before and quietly stopped using them.
Most platforms are built for logistics companies running fifty vehicles, not a heating contractor with six engineers and a busy scheduler. The interfaces are complex, the data is overwhelming, and the value does not show up fast enough to justify the friction.
What actually works for a plumbing and heating business is narrow, fast, and immediately useful. When a business owner can see – at a glance, on a phone or a laptop – where every vehicle is right now, which jobs are running ahead or behind, and how fuel spend this week compares to last week, specific things change.
The scheduler stops spending the first ninety minutes of the day on the phone establishing where everyone is. The engineer who finishes early gets redirected before he starts driving back to the yard. The fuel anomaly gets flagged before it becomes a dispute. The MOT deadline appears on a dashboard three weeks out, not the morning the van fails its check.
At month-end, there is actual data: cost per job, utilisation by vehicle, mileage by engineer – the kind of numbers that show you where margin is going, rather than the gut feel that fills the gap when data is absent. For businesses quoting on contract work with housing associations or local authorities, that data is increasingly the difference between winning and losing. Documented attendance records, accurate job durations, and traceable vehicle histories are not nice-to-haves in that procurement environment. They are table stakes.
Key questions
I talk to plumbing and heating business owners regularly, and when I ask them to describe a normal Tuesday morning – where the vans are, what each engineer is working on, whether the jobs are running to time –most cannot answer with any precision. They have a version of it, assembled from memory and messages. But they do not know. And they know they do not know, which is why there is always a background anxiety to running a multi-vehicle trades business that never fully goes away.
That anxiety has a cost too, though it never appears on a balance sheet. It shows up in reactive decisions, in the over-servicing of some customers and the under-servicing of others, in the margin that quietly gets squeezed because nobody had the numbers to push back.
Fleet visibility does not eliminate the complexity of running a plumbing and heating business. But it replaces guesswork with information, and in a sector where margins are tight and customers are increasingly demanding, that shift is not a luxury. It is a competitive necessity.
The vans sitting in your yard tonight either made you money today or quietly cost you some. The only question is whether you know which.
