Fuel management company dramatically improves efficiency using Zoho One
- INDUSTRYBusiness Services
- Key AppsZoho One: CRM, Analytics
"Zoho One has streamlined our operations, giving us a complete view of our business. From managing sales data to tracking marketing campaigns, everything is more efficient."
About the company
GCo Fuels offers a fuel savings program that helps New Zealand businesses save 20%–30% of overhead costs without affecting operational efficiency. GCo is well-loved nationwide for combining significant fuel discounts with a fee-free, flexible payment structure, delivering budget-friendly fuel management solutions.
The challenge
One of the biggest challenges for GCo was that most daily operations relied on key staff members knowing and having a detailed understanding of everyday processes. This increased the business' risk profile significantly because processes would need to be delayed or temporarily ceased when a key staff member was unavailable. As the business grew, it became critical for Rod to ensure there were documented processes and systems in place to mitigate the risk to his business.
Another challenge was aggregating data from three different suppliers who provided data in different formats. Not only were the team processing all this information and paperwork manually, they were also sending out three invoices to each customer because they didn't have a way to unify the supplier information. On one side, this was inconveniencing their customers, and on the other side, the whole process of sending out invoices took the team up to 10 days.
As the business grew and the number of customers increased, at one point, the GCo team were working with over 10,000 records opening up the floodgates to data misrepresentation, human errors, and duplicated efforts.
Inevitably, their existing systems buckled under pressure, and Managing Director Rod Gabb decided to look for greener pastures.
The solution
Rod and his team worked with the Authorised Zoho Partners at Innovate Now to customise Zoho CRM and accommodate the business's evolving requirements. They used Zoho's advanced APIs to enable GCo to bring data in from separate suppliers in different formats, along with a list of each customer's transactions. This data is then processed in a custom-built processing engine built in a third-party system, which is integrated with Zoho Writer to create the layout required for invoices. This methodology has enabled the team to issue one consolidated invoice to each customer.
The Innovate Now team also used Zoho Analytics to provide extensive reporting capabilities to GCo. Today, Zoho Analytics manages three main types of data:
- Pre-processing information such as fuel costs, fuel volume, pricing trends, and profit margins
- Post-invoicing information such as customer purchasing patterns
- All transaction details for each customer
Yash Kapoor from Innovate Now (left) and Rod Gabb from GCo Fuels (right).
Benefits and ROI
The biggest benefit that the GCo team has achieved from transitioning to Zoho One is the dramatic decrease in time spent on manual tasks. Tasks like invoicing that took nearly 10 days of manual effort now take less than a day to complete automatically. "It’s not just about saving time—it’s about building value in the business," Rod noted.
"We were spending up to 10 days a month just invoicing and producing reports. All of that's done in about 5 hours now."
Looking forward
The GCo team has big plans for the future. With the new Zoho system being able to aggregate all invoices and provide a clear picture of their customer, the team is now looking forward to working with more suppliers. In the longer term, the goals is to create a comparison tool of all fuel providers that customers can interact with and choose from.
Learn more about how GCo uses Zoho to work efficiently.