Dubbed TotalCost, the tool gives fleet decision-makers complete flexibility when building up a whole-life cost picture of individual vehicles or a basket of company cars and vans by allowing the setting of multiple parameters to compare the performance of a vehicle against its competition.

TotalCost incorporates all vehicle list prices with fleet decision-makers able to build in their own financial terms on a manufacturer, model or derivative basis.

Importantly, residual values are generated from actual residual value data derived from DMS Insight Survey – the company’s contract hire tool for assessing residual values, which it says is compiled from data supplied by all leading contract hire and leasing companies.

Servicing, maintenance and repair costs (SMR) are based on the company’s own SMR Cost Analysis programme, which uses manufacturer parts pricing and labour times for services and common replacement items to calculate actual running costs. With the additional purchase of this separate tool, users can choose whether or not to change default replacement intervals for tyres and all wear items. They also have the ability to enter their own labour rates, oil prices, parts and labour discounts to further reflect their fleet profile.

Additionally, DMS uses another of the company’s recently launched tools, SMR BurnRate, to enable fleets to factor in real-world replacement rates and costs for a basket of 63 components including wiper blade replacement, break pads, brake discs and tyres, based on data gathered from the contract hire and leasing industry compiled across more than 300,000 company cars and vans and some 4.3 million “incidents” of part renewal.

Meanwhile, national average fuel prices are updated daily with business able to include in their whole life cost calculations a financial split between business and private mileage.

Other factors that TotalCost takes into account are: corporate taxes including writing-down allowances, finance costs, short-term vehicle replacement, Class 1A National Insurance costs, Vehicle Excise Duty, MPG, CO2 emissions, insurance costs and Benefit-in-Kind tax.

The tool is available online following the purchase of an annual licence, with cost dependent on functionality required, the number of licence holders and size of fleet.

Jeff Edgar, director of business development at DMS, said: ‘Every single financial factor that should be used by fleet operators to calculate the absolute whole-life cost of a vehicle is included within TotalCost and the most influential figures – depreciation, fuel and SMR – utilise real-world information.

‘Fleet operators can choose which factors they include in their calculations, but savvy decision-makers will take account of all the information available to them to build up the most accurate whole-life cost picture of their vehicles, thus enabling fully informed budget forecasts to be made.’