Fuel is one of the highest operating costs for businesses in Kenya. yet somehow one of the least digitized, many companies still rely on paper logbooks, WhatsApp messages, phone calls to approve fueling, and month-end reconciliations that almost never balance out.
The result is a familiar cycle, fuel losses that are hard to trace, fuel consumptions that don’t match receipts, drivers waiting for approvals, and fleet managers spending more time policing than planning. Every month, money slips through the cracks, not because businesses don’t care, but because they simply don’t have the tools to see what’s really happening.
Over time, this forced companies into an uncomfortable choice: trust blindly or micromanage manually. Neither approach worked well. One drained profits, the other drained time. And the tension around fuel management only grew as fleets expanded.
But in recent years, something began to shift. Real, actionable data started moving from the background to the centre of fleet operations. And that shift is now transforming how businesses think about fuel altogether.
The Breaking Point: When Manual Systems Couldn’t Keep Up
Every fleet manager has a story. A mysterious fuel bill that was double the usual. A driver who fueled twice within an hour. A receipt that didn’t match the station records. A business trip where the recorded mileage somehow never aligned with the fuel consumed.
Individually, these incidents look small. But across a fleet of vehicles, over months and years, they grow into a loss problem that quietly eats into margins.
At the same time, manual systems were becoming increasingly unrealistic.
The more fleets grew, the more this patchwork system strained. Businesses needed to know in the moment what was happening with their fuel spend, not weeks later.
The Data Shift Reshaping Fleet Operations
Fleet operations today are no longer just about moving vehicles from point A to B. They’re about efficiency, predictability, and control and that requires solid data. Businesses with real-time insight into their fuel usage have consistently found they can:
In short, data replaces guesswork.
But access to that data has always been the missing link in East Africa. Unlike markets where digital fuel networks are already widespread, here the infrastructure simply wasn’t in place until recently. We rolled out the Forecourt Management Solution (FMS) and it changed that. Spread across over 100 fuel stations in Kenya, FMS digitizes the fueling process, enables automated verification, and gives stations the infrastructure to support secure, real-time transactions.
With this foundation established, the next step was building a product that would bring all this power directly to businesses.
Introducing Drive: Fuel Management Reimagined
Drive is Pesapal’s digital fleet fuel management solution designed to give businesses real-time visibility, control, and accountability over every fuel transaction.
Drive was built from the ground up for the realities of doing business in this region. It acknowledges the challenges fleet operators deal with daily: fuel fraud, inconsistent station availability, cross-border operations, mobile money culture, and decentralized workflows.
How Drive Actually Works
Here’s what a fueling transaction looks like with Drive:
Solving the Problems That Cost Businesses the Most
Drive directly addresses the top challenges that have held fleets back for years such as
Driver’s real-time checks, instant notifications from fueling events, alert managers of any violations or suspicious behavior.
Digitized reporting removes the tedious month-end work. Fleet and finance teams can finally focus on planning, not paperwork.
With every action logged in, businesses get full audit trails supporting compliance, transparency, and internal controls.
Why This Matters for Businesses
Fuel fraud and inefficient fleet management cost businesses millions annually often invisibly. Every incident that goes untracked compounds over time.
Beyond the financial losses, the operational strain has been enormous. Fleet managers have rotated between detective work and crisis management. Finance teams have lived inside mismatched spreadsheets.
Who is Drive Built For?
Drive is ideal for organizations managing three or more vehicles, including:
Now, businesses don’t have to choose between trust and control, fleet managers, finance teams, and business owners can all speak the same language the language of accurate, real-time data.
