Reading the cost trend over time

The Fleet Cost Cockpit can show how costs move month by month, not just as a single total. This article explains where the monthly trend comes from and how to read it.

Where the trend appears

The monthly trend is part of a drill-down (breakdown) into a single item in a dimension — one vehicle, one cost center, one pool, one driver, or the fleet as a whole. When you open the breakdown for a bucket, the cockpit returns, alongside the category split, a series of monthly points for the selected period. Each point is one calendar month with the total cost recorded in that month.

How months are built

Every cost record carries an effective date (its refuelling date, Beleg date, payment date, completion date, and so on). The breakdown groups those records by year and month, sums the amounts in each month, and returns the points in chronological order. Months with no cost simply have no point.

Note: Leasing is what makes the trend smooth. Because a leasing contract's monthly rate is charged once for each active month, a vehicle with a lease shows a steady baseline every month, with fuel, maintenance, damage and receipts adding variable spikes on top.

Reading the trend

Use the shape of the line to answer questions the grand total can't:

• Is spend rising or falling? A steady climb across months points to growing running costs; a flat line dominated by leasing suggests a well-behaved, predictable vehicle.
• Where are the spikes? A single tall month usually maps to a one-off event — a large repair invoice (damage), a major service, or an annual insurance installment.
• Are costs seasonal? Fuel-heavy fleets often show winter peaks; comparing the same months across years highlights this.

Getting a fleet-wide trend

To see the whole fleet's trend rather than a single vehicle, drill into the Fleet dimension. This aggregates every source into one monthly line, giving you the overall cost curve for the period. To isolate what is driving a spike, open the breakdown for the specific vehicle or cost center and read its category split for the same window.

Tip: Widen the period to at least twelve months before reading the trend. A short window can make a normal annual insurance payment look like a runaway cost, when it is simply a once-a-year charge.

Trend and category together

The breakdown always pairs the monthly trend with the category split for the same node. Read them together: the trend tells you when costs occurred, and the category totals tell you what they were. A spike in a given month plus a large "damage" category, for instance, tells you a repair drove that month.

Who can view trends

Drill-downs are part of the cockpit and require the fleetcost:view permission, typically held by the FleetManager role.

Related

• Filtering the cost cockpit by dimension and period
• Interpreting the cost KPIs
• Total cost of ownership per vehicle
• How costs are aggregated across sources