Business payments expert Inez Berkhof-Hollander explores the complex relationships between commercial vehicle manufacturers, dealers and fleets—and why managing credit, invoicing and payments is particularly challenging in this sector
In the commercial vehicles world, downtime is the enemy. Every hour a truck or van spends off the road has a measurable impact on productivity, customer service, and profitability. The industry's response has been to build more reliable vehicles, improve workshop efficiency, invest in predictive maintenance and reduce repair times wherever possible.
But there's another important contributor to reducing downtime that receives far less attention. That's probably because it doesn't happen in the dealer showroom, forecourt or workshop; it happens in the back office, across procurement, finance, dealer administration and accounts payable functions.
Here, POs are checked, invoices reconciled, credit approved, and payments authorised.
None of these activities repairs a vehicle, but collectively, if not optimised, they can delay repairs, complicate relationships between fleets and dealers and ultimately keep vehicles off the road longer than necessary.
As a result, for many global players, administrative efficiency is emerging as an increasingly important part of the aftersales experience. Exacerbating this shift is the fact that large commercial fleets have never been anything less than complex to manage. Most fleets operate vehicles from multiple manufacturers as a matter of course. In the heavy truck sector, working with multiple manufacturers allows operators to match vehicles to specialist applications, whether in construction, temperature-controlled transport, utilities. In the light commercial vehicle market, different models are often selected for specific operational requirements.
Maintaining a diverse fleet preserves commercial leverage when negotiating vehicle purchases, servicing, and parts agreements. From an operational perspective, however, every additional manufacturer introduces another layer of complexity. Different dealer networks operate under different commercial terms, credit arrangements vary, payment policies differ between dealerships and every partner has its own preferred way of handling purchase orders, invoices and approvals.
All this choice and customer-facing flexibility makes life harder at the back end. Pricing agreements may exist at the manufacturer level, but be administered locally, which can equal different regional or national workflows. The reality is managing all of this has become an increasingly significant administrative burden for fleet managers, particularly for organisations operating across multiple regions or European markets.
The invisible causes of downtime
Which is starting to let that enemy, downtime, creep in through the back door. When a vehicle arrives at a dealership, credit needs to be verified, POs confirmed, pricing has to be validated against negotiated agreements and customer records checked. Similar administrative steps take place at the garage, and once repairs are complete, invoices must move through approval processes before payment can be released.
Delays in credit checks or repair approvals can postpone work, while invoice reconciliation after a repair usually affects administration and payment rather than the vehicle’s return to service.
Repair approval is a distinct step in some fleet workflows: Fleetio’s repair-order guidance describes how orders may be approved automatically or reviewed manually.
And it’s not only a one-off challenge. It happens over and over again, across every variation in processes, systems, and commercial arrangements. The problem becomes even more pronounced when multiple departments become involved. Fleet management, procurement, finance, dealer administration and manufacturer aftersales teams all need to play a part, with information frequently moving between disconnected systems and manual workflows.
Every handover introduces another opportunity for delays, misunderstandings or disputes.
For fleet operators, the consequences are all-too-familiar: invoices arriving from multiple dealer locations, inconsistent payment arrangements, repeated or unanswered administrative queries and increasing pressure on accounts payable teams tasked with processing large volumes of transactions.
The result is an operational burden that consumes valuable time but contributes little to getting vehicles back into service. Is there a better way to do this—one that reduces administrative friction, gets vehicles back on the road faster, earning their keep for operators and delivering for their customers?
Legacy processes in a digital world
Ironically, many of today's commercial vehicles are more connected than the businesses that maintain them. Telematics, predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics and connected fleet technologies have transformed vehicle operations.
Yet many of the commercial processes surrounding maintenance remain surprisingly fragmented. Fleet operators typically rely on fleet management software, procurement platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and finance applications. Dealers, meanwhile, rely on their own established dealer management systems, while manufacturers operate their own separate aftersales, pricing and customer platforms.
Each system undoubtedly does its job well, but few communicate seamlessly with one another. As a result, employees often become the integration layer, manually transferring information between systems, validating data, and resolving discrepancies that technology should arguably handle automatically.
It’s a striking irony that digital transformation has modernised the industry faster than it has modernised the commercial processes supporting it.
Why aftersales matters more than ever
The industry’s transition toward electric vehicles complicates this picture even further. Historically, manufacturers have generated significant long-term revenue through replacement parts and servicing. All-electric vehicles generally require less routine maintenance because they have fewer moving parts and fluids to change, according to the US Alternative Fuels Data Center.
That doesn't diminish the importance of aftersales; it may in fact enhance it. As traditional commercial fleet management servicing revenues change, customer experience becomes a more significant differentiator. Engineering excellence and vehicle performance remain important to customer loyalty, but the quality of the aftersales experience may increasingly influence whether fleet operators stay with a manufacturer. The efficiency, consistency, and simplicity of the ownership experience becomes increasingly important.
That experience extends well beyond the repair itself. Fleet operators will slowly stop judginga maintenance event purely by how quickly a technician replaces a component, but by how straightforward it was to authorise the repair, whether pricing was transparent, if all the invoice steps were accurate and how much administrative effort the process required.
Do we need a new definition of ‘downtime’?
In other words, commercial efficiency has become part of customer experience. This is prompting some manufacturers to rethink not only how repairs are performed, but how the commercial relationships surrounding repairs could be better managed. Rather than treating invoicing, credit, pricing, approvals and payments as separate administrative functions, there's growing recognition they form part of the overall maintenance process.
Consolidated billing, standardised commercial policies across dealer networks, centralised credit arrangements and greater transparency between manufacturers, dealers, and fleet operators can all reduce unnecessary administrative effort. The objective is always removing friction and removing any last chance of downtime from the ecosystem.
When you think about it, this makes eminent sense. If purchase order requirements are already embedded within commercial workflows with the supply chain, invoices are less likely to be rejected. When pricing is standardised, fewer disputes arise, and when dealers have greater payment certainty, they can concentrate on servicing vehicles rather than managing collections.
For fleet operators, the focus can at last pivot from processing hundreds of individual transactions toward managing a simpler, more consistent commercial relationship. Equally importantly, manufacturers gain a clearer understanding of what happens after a vehicle leaves the showroom, particularly within franchise dealer networks, where visibility into parts sales and customer interactions has traditionally been limited.
Let’s finish where we started. A commercial vehicle generates value only when it's on the road. As margins tighten, customer expectations evolve, and electrification reshapes the economics of the entire commercial vehicle vertical, reducing administrative friction may prove to be one of the industry's best opportunities.
Will the next wave of competitive advantage come not from repairing vehicles faster, but from removing the back-office friction that keeps them in the workshop longer than necessary?
A few years from now, that may be the definition of avoiding downtime that makes the most commercial sense—removing the invoicing and payment challenges that keep vehicles off the road in the first place.
The author is Managing Director, EMEA at TreviPay