All companies that have more than 250 staff or meet a range of other criteria have to complete their first audit by 5 December or face penalties of up to £50,000.

The ESOS audit then needs to be carried out every four years. It includes estimates of the energy used by buildings, industrial processes and transport – including company and grey fleet activity – to identify cost-effective energy saving measures.

The estimates that should be included in the report cover a 12-month period and can be based on verifiable inputs such as mileage or a general conversion factor such as energy use per mile. It is these factors that are used in the Chevin ESOS calculator. 

Ashley Sowerby, managing director at Chevin, said: “Putting together the ESOS report is quite a large task for companies, so being able to automate at least the fleet element of it is very useful for FleetWave customers.” 

There is also a responsibility to include energy saving ideas in the audit although there is no legal obligation for these to be implemented by companies.

Sowerby added: “This is also something that can be done using FleetWave to estimate effectively how different measures could impact on energy use. This is, of course, a very useful exercise and an opportunity that fleets should embrace.”

He added that a growing part of the usage patterns of fleet software were based around fleets meeting all kinds of statutory responsibilities covering not just environment responsibilities but Duty of Care but several other areas.

“More and more demands of this type are being made on fleets and we are increasingly being asked to provide reports and tools that will make meeting this wider range of corporate obligations as easy as possible.

“We see this very much a key element in the development of FleetWave going forward. Fleets are being asked to collect more and more data for statutory purposes and part of our job is to make this as easy as possible.”