Fleet maintenance cost report: how to build one

The maintenance report acts as a tool to help control fleet maintenance and identify areas where management improvements can be applied.

Like any other report type, it presents information about the period's occurrences, spending involved, services performed, responsible professionals and comparisons with previous periods.

Among other data that may be present, reports are used to generate fleet knowledge and analysis, supporting decisions aligned with the reality of your company's transport operations.

To help you fully understand what a maintenance report is and why to use one in fleet management, we have prepared this complete post. Explore:

• What a maintenance report is;
• Benefits of using a maintenance report;
• How to create a preventive maintenance report;
• What to include in the fleet maintenance report;
• Report creation errors to avoid.

What is a maintenance report?

The maintenance report is a resource for fleet maintenance management. It is a document bringing together information about the fleet and the preventive and corrective services performed on vehicles during a given period.

Depending on the manager's objective, a report may be aimed at understanding maintenance costs, the number of occurrences in the period, vehicle idle time and so on.

In other words, there are different ways to complete and use a maintenance report.

Two definitions need to be written in the document before any number: the period covered and the set of vehicles considered. Without them, two reports from the same fleet stop being comparable — and comparison is precisely what gives an indicator meaning.

Benefits of using a maintenance report

Viewing services performed by license plate

One way to use a maintenance report is to identify which services were performed and which vehicles went through the workshop. The view can be divided into preventive and corrective services, identifying the license plates that received each maintenance type.

The benefit arises mainly when this organization also includes recording how many times each vehicle underwent services. This lets you identify whether the frequency is normal, average or excessive.

For “normal” and “excessive” to mean anything, the comparison needs a declared baseline: the fleet's own average in the same period or that vehicle's history in previous periods. Comparing vehicles with different uses — urban operations and highways, for example — tends to produce mistaken conclusions.

Understanding amounts allocated to fleet maintenance

When recording the maintenance types the fleet underwent, you also need to identify the costs of each. In addition, separate these costs by service description:

The amounts in the table below are illustrative and serve only to show the format, with amounts in Brazilian reais (R$): service prices vary by region, supplier, vehicle type and quote date, so always use figures from your own operation.

This way, you can understand whether budgets are within the plan or above expectations. If excessive, you need to identify the reason and the most suitable solution.

That is why the next benefit is:

Identifying items with the most occurrences

If a vehicle underwent corrective work many times in a period, it indicates an issue. It may be due to poor driving behavior or another unidentified issue in how the vehicle operates.

By analyzing the number of occurrences, the description and the service to correct the issue, it becomes easier to identify probable causes.

Notice that the report indicates recurrence, not cause. It shows that the same item returned to the workshop three times in two months; saying why requires looking at the service description, the part used and who did the work. Treating recurrence as a ready-made diagnosis leads to component replacement without resolving what caused the failure.

Assessing driver behavior and responsibilities

The maintenance report is a good way to understand whether drivers use appropriate practices in traffic and drive defensively. It also helps assess whether they correctly perform vehicle inspections, as described in the fleet maintenance plan.

The interpretation here is indirect and requires care: what the document records is the consequence — unusual wear, repeated corrective maintenance, an item always reappearing on the same vehicle — rather than conduct itself. It serves to raise a hypothesis and start a conversation, rather than justify holding an individual accountable before checking route, cargo and vehicle age.

Keeping track of vehicle availability

One benefit of a maintenance report is providing a view of available, under-repair or stopped vehicles in your fleet. Another way to present this information is a view of how long each vehicle was available, stopped or in the workshop.

Conclusions you can draw from this data include: vehicles with the best and lowest productivity in the period, and those causing the greatest financial loss to the operation, combining this information with maintenance costs.

For consistent interpretation, first define what counts as downtime: only the vehicle inside the workshop, or also waiting for a part and quote approval. Both choices are defensible; what does not work is changing criteria from one period to the next.

Assessing maintenance performance indicators

Every management area has performance indicators that help assess the strategies adopted and daily fleet actions. For maintenance, these may include indicators such as a vehicle's Mean Time to Repair or even the asset's Replacement Forecast.

The most cited indicators in this area are simple averages, and the name itself describes the calculation:

• Mean time to repair: total hours spent on repairs in the period divided by the number of completed repairs.
• Mean time between failures: time the vehicle operated in the period divided by the number of recorded failures.
• Availability: time the vehicle was fit to operate divided by the period's total time, normally presented as a percentage.

What changes the result is not the formula, but the convention adopted: whether the repair clock starts when the work order is opened or when the vehicle enters the workshop, whether waiting for a part is counted, whether weekends count as time in the period. Record the convention in the report itself and keep it from one period to the next, or the series stops being comparable with itself.

Generally, a report is already built around one or more indicators, so be sure to identify the analysis you want to perform before starting your document.

How do you create a maintenance report?

To build your maintenance report, the first step is to gather the necessary information. Then organize data and metrics in the way that makes most sense.

Some information that may be included:

• Maintenance types;
• Costs by service;
• Costs by license plate;
• Occurrences by driver;
• Vehicle information;
• Description of activities performed;
• Criticality level of maintenance services.

It is worth adding two fields that are often missing: each service's opening and closing date and mileage or the hour-meter reading at the time of service. Without them, cost per kilometer and intervals between maintenance activities cannot be calculated later.

If the electronic checklist is used in your fleet, building the report takes less work: completed checklists automatically generate complete reports, which can be exported for analysis or integrated into your BI tool through Prolog's free API.

What should you include in the fleet maintenance report?

It depends on the report type you are building.

A preventive maintenance report, for example, needs information about all preventive services performed and which vehicles properly underwent prevention.

It is useful to seek data on the prevention routine, such as daily checklist completion: how many were completed, average completion time for each, which drivers completed them correctly and which failed to comply, etc.

A caution about average form completion time: it measures adherence to the process, not inspection quality. Very fast completion may indicate a checklist answered without thinking, which is a signal to check with the team rather than punish immediately.

The report may also contain where services were performed, quote comparisons and each service's execution time. This is valuable information if you want to assess the quality of service provided to your fleet.

Report creation errors to avoid

A lack of real information about the routine and fleet vehicles is the main error you need to avoid. If you lack enough data to build a report, it may be time to implement new tools so collection happens regularly and more efficiently.

Without documentation of your routine, analyses remain superficial and decisions are made without a concrete basis, which can generate more issues.

Three other errors occur frequently and are simpler to correct:

• Adding preventive and corrective maintenance into the same total: the consolidated number rises and falls without saying what changed. Separating the two types shows whether prevention is working.
• Changing criteria between periods: changing what counts as a stopped vehicle, or the interval covered, breaks comparison with previous reports.
• Closing the report without a responsible person or deadline: a document describing the issue without stating who acts and by when becomes reading rather than management.

To avoid the underlying error, which is the lack of reliable source data, one alternative is adopting the electronic checklist. Learn more in our free material by downloading it here (in Portuguese).