The Halfords “fleetcard’ enables the employees of participating companies to purchase items from a pre-agreed list of products – resulting in centralised payments that remove the need for businesses to process individual expense claims.

As well as making the billing process more efficient, fleetcard allows business customers to standardise the brand, quality and price of the products purchased by ensuring they all come from the same source.

Fleet card is ideal for small ad hoc purchases like wiper blades and headlight bulbs. Halfords added that its 2,000 plus trained store colleagues capable of fitting these consumable items with no booking or invoice fee is also expected to prove popular.

Card security is protected by up to 10 validation fields chosen by the business – for example car registration number, purchase order number etc. – as well as photographic identification. In addition, each customer can place a restriction on the number of items or value of each transaction to further guard against misuse

There are no set-up fees and Halfords also established a dedicated fleetcard support team to ensure the needs of individual customers are met.

Halfords fleetcard manager Rob Myers said: ‘We believe there is real demand for this service – which offers businesses operating a fleet of vehicles the potential to significantly reduce the complexity handling large numbers of individual transactions.

‘Not only can fleetcard customers approve items for their employees to purchase from a list over 10,000 product lines but with 465 Halfords stores placing us within 20 minutes for 90% of the UK population we offer unrivalled convenience.’