Employee home charging: how to improve fleet operations with effective reimbursement management

Home charging is becoming a common practice for commercial fleet charging for its convenience and ability to balance vehicle flow and energy use. Using AMPECO backend’s home charging capabilities, CPOs can deliver a streamlined offering to fleets that are considering a home charging component for their fleet charging strategy.

Offering effective employee reimbursement management, CPOs will help fleets alleviate administrative burden, cut cost, and prevent employees from staying out-of-pocket while conveniently charging at home.

Why home charging for fleets

Successful EV fleet operations require vehicles to be sufficiently charged at all times, in the most efficient way possible, in order to deliver timely services. Typically done at the fleet operator’s private hub or a depot location, fleet charging involves managing and optimizing the charging of several vehicles simultaneously, making it crucial for commercial and public fleets to keep moving and maximize vehicle performance. 

Charging at home, on the other hand, is by far the most convenient and cheapest way to charge vehicles. Allowing fleet employees to charge vehicles at home can help fleet operators better balance vehicle flow and energy use while allowing drivers to reduce time spent during the working day charging and start each working day with a fully charged vehicle.

This is why more fleet owners are offering drivers to have chargers installed at home by the company. Drivers use these chargers to charge their cars each night and bill their employer at the end of the month for the electricity used through the charger.

The problem with home charging

Despite the benefits, reimbursing employees for charging their EVs at home can be complex and add extra administrative burden to both the employee and the company. Current methods include manual processes, receipts exchange, and excel spreadsheets with data from disjointed systems such as charging data and electricity rates. Think tens of thousands of vehicles in a big fleet, and such manual processes can end up causing confusion, stress and delayed payments to employees.

Ideally, drivers should be able to easily mark personal charging sessions in their mobile app, so only sessions due for reimbursement can be sent to employer.

The opportunity for CPOs

Charger manufacturers, installers, or network operators and utilities, who supply chargers and services to B2B fleet clients and their drivers can use CPMS software to streamline home charging and reimbursement data – thus providing a strong value-add in addition to commercial charging management and maintenance.

A strong software offering should be able to support public, private and home charging, and offer user, partner, billing and reporting management capabilities. In addition, the solution should incorporate smart charging and dynamic electricity rates, allowing employees to schedule home charging and save on their bills.

AMPECO’s backend solution for home and fleet

AMPECO’s platform, well-tested with hundreds of OCPP-compliant AC and DC station models, is well suited for serving both fleet and home charging customer needs. 

The software capabilities support multiple scenarios based on each CPO customer’s unique use case. Capabilities making streamlined employee reimbursement for fleets possible include:

Partner management

Partner management capabilities are especially important with CPOs managing chargers for various customers – such as site hosts, or fleets. Those capabilities allow assigning, segmenting and managing all charging operations based on the respective fleet or site.

Charger types support

AMPECO’s backend distinguishes charger types based on the use case they will fulfill and the options the driver charging app exposes. For fleets and their employees, the appropriate types will be:

• Commercial private charging – The commercial private charger type can be set on chargers for private fleet hubs where chargers are not available to the public or no direct payments are required.

• Home charging – The home, or private charger type in the AMPECO system, allows CPOs to configure the home user smart charging capabilities available in the app. 

Smart charging and dynamic electricity rates

CPOs can enable home users to manage and schedule their charging through the app and use the best electricity rates for maximum cost savings. Smart charging default settings can be configured at the system level, and at the home charger level. 

CPOs can also set Energy Time-of-Use (ToU) charging tariffs to utilize day-ahead electricity rates available via an integration with Nord Pool or Octopus (UK).

EV-driver charging app

The AMPECO charging mobile app allows EV drivers to charge both in public and at home, view their charging history, and track down payments, pricing and other stats.

• Add a home charger: In the app, drivers can assign a home charger or even manage multiple home chargers.
• Schedule charging: The EV driver can define the start and end time for the charging, set the target charge, and track the cost of charging by setting the price per kWh for the scheduled period. 
• Auto-optimize for lower cost: This option is exposed to the EV driver when dynamic pricing is available and activated on the charger (e.g. integration with Nord Pool). If selected, it will activate an algorithm that will optimize the charging to achieve the desired charge level and time at the cheapest times available.
• View session history and mark sessions as personal: The EV driver can see the charging history for all their home charging sessions, and mark sessions as personal in the individual session summary.

Employee reimbursement: how it works

One reimbursement scenario possible in AMPECO is when the reimbursement is handled by a third party – current integration is with AllStar – former Mina. Data gets transferred via API based on energy delivered per charge point, and a defined reimbursement rate.

Setting up home chargers for reimbursement

For this scenario to work, CPOs need to prepare all fleet partner home chargers by marking them eligible for reimbursement, after which working with the partner to match home users to charger IDs.

1. Make sure the respective chargers are of the type Home (personal) and assigned properly to the fleet partner

2. Mark the home charger for Electricity Cost Reimbursement – here you can indicate if you would be using a third-party integration, such as AllStar (former MINA), or another method

3. Set the Electricity Rate, or alternatively, assign to the charger EVSE a tariff group containing dynamic pricing (e.g. Nord Pool) – you need this option, if you will be taking advantage of making smart charging available to the EV driver

4. Now you need to work with the fleet partner on obtaining a list of the EV drivers to be added to the reimbursement, with their respective charge point IDs or serial numbers

Reimbursement data

Once this setup is complete, session data from the home charge point that is not marked as personal will be available via an API call from the selected third party.

The EV driver experience

The EV driver would be able to see the charging history for all their home charging sessions and mark sessions as “Personal” in their Session Summary. This way, personal sessions will be excluded from the reimbursement.

Win-win for CPO and fleet

Using AMPECO’s home charging capabilities, CPOs can deliver a streamlined offering to fleets that are considering a home charging component for their fleet charging strategy.

CPO technology benefits:

• Easily distinguish fleet partner chargers, both commercial and employee home, and monitor their status
• Configure home chargers for optimal energy use
• Automatically deliver an end-of-month employee reimbursement data via an API integration

Fleet business efficiencies:

• Reduced administrative burden with an automatic employee reimbursement data
• Additional cost savings with smart charging and dynamic electricity rates at home
• Efficient vehicle flow, distributed between charging hub and home, ready to go when needed
• Happier and more productive employees, with less time spent at work for charging, and no out-of-pocket expenses

Conclusion

Home charging and the ability to provide a reimbursement data is presenting CPOs and their fleet customers and drivers with new opportunities to improve their offering, improve fleet operations and the driver experience.