Top 10 Tricks of the trade
Are you looking for your next company car or van, or looking for business leasing deals for your business? If yes, the chances are that you are scanning the internet to find the best car leasing deals. But, with so many car leasing deals offering a range of varying prices and packages, spotting the best from the rest can be a difficult task, especially when it comes to making sure the deal is exactly what you need.
The trick, as with any deal, is in the detail and to make it easier to ensure you're getting the best deal for you, without any hidden surprises before, during or after your leasing deal, we've collated the following list of tricks to look out for.
1. Up-front Payments
The up-front payment, which is sometimes referred to as deposit or advance payment, can be hard to find online, especially when you consider that the most obvious thing to look out for is the monthly rental figure. But every car leasing agreement has an up-front payment which is usually equal to 3, 6 or 9 monthly payments – however, we've seen some as high as £5,000. The methodology is the larger the up-front payment, the lower the monthly payment will become.
At Ayvens, we will always advertise our deals with 6 payments in advance so you know exactly how much you are paying. Furthermore, we don't hide this figure and our team will always make it clear exactly how much you'll pay so that there are no nasty surprises when it comes to leasing company cars or vans.
2. VAT
Something to bear in mind when looking at car and van leasing quotes for your next car is that business and personal leasing prices are advertised with one main difference - VAT is not included in business leasing quotes and is on personal leasing quotes.
As a business customer if you are VAT registered, you can claim back up to 50% of the VAT on cars and 100% on vans, and 100% of any maintenance costs on the vehicle if you take out a fully maintained contract. We always advise our customers to speak to their accountant to ensure that you know exactly how much VAT you can claim back.
3. Excess Mileage
A key factor that is used to manipulate monthly payments of a van or car leasing quote is the annual mileage figure.
The standard quotation for car leasing deals has an annual mileage figure of 10,000 miles per annum (30,000 over a 3 year deal), but some deals advertised online use figures lower than this to make the monthly rental figures more attractive.
All of the deals that we advertise are based on a 10,000 mile per annum quote, however you can amend these on our website to suit your business leasing requirements. Our team will always ask the mileage that you expect to do so that we can tailor an accurate quote depending on that number of miles.
4. Vehicle availability
In recent years, with the rise of car leasing websites, it can be difficult to know if that deal you are seeing is too good to be true. There have been many cases of outstanding deals promoting desirable vehicles that are in very short supply, the end result of this is of course, unhappy prospects and customers.
At Ayvens we'll only advertise vehicles that we know we have supply on and will always offer customers an accurate lead time for delivery based on up to date information from the manufacturer. And, if we say a vehicle is in stock, that's because it is exactly that.
5. Maintenance and Tyres
Maintenance contracts are offered by most car leasing companies and will cover you for any maintenance, servicing items and tyre changes for the duration of the contract. But many of these maintenance packages can be limited in the frequency of access to certain services, like tyres, which can only be replaced a certain number of times over the contract.
Here at Ayvens, we offer a fully comprehensive service and maintenance package and for items like tyres we have an unlimited policy for the life of the contract - after all, how can you predict how many unexpected punctures you may have? We'll also include roadside, home start & European breakdown recovery as standard in your contract.
6. Road Fund Licence
Another cost which can be hidden on occasion with car leasing deals advertised on the internet is Road Fund Licence (RFL), with some deals only including RFL for the first year and then charging you per year for the remainder of the contract, sometimes including a handling fee too.
With Ayvens, Road Fund Licence is included for the whole contract, without any handling fees for the benefit.
7. Hidden Fees
Hidden fees are difficult to spot, they are hidden after all! With car leasing, they'll generally appear in the form of administration fees, finance acceptance fees or handling fees for documents - basically it's anything that hasn't been advertised as part of your leasing agreement.
Here at Ayvens, we won't charge you for anything that isn't advertised in your tailored quotation and any administration, finance acceptances and handling fees for documents are, as they should be, covered by us.
8. Amending of contracts
Predicting how many miles you'll do over the life of your business leasing deal can be difficult and you may reach the middle of your contract and realise that you've gone a few thousand miles over the annual mileage that you expected to do at the start of the contract. We understand that predicting annual mileages can be difficult for business vehicles, and so we provide a service that makes it easy for you.
With an Ayvens leasing deal you can restructure your leasing deal, as long as you have more than 6 months remaining on your deal, to take into account. The restructured deal will re-work out the payments for the remainder of your business lease.
9. Fair Wear and Tear
At the end of your leasing deal you'll be handing the car back to the leasing company for a once over, and all things being well there will be no further costs between you and your next business leasing deal. But a 3 or 4 year old car is likely to have had one or two bumps and scrapes along the way, who pays for those?
At Ayvens, we abide by the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), Fair Wear and Tear Policy. We will check the vehicle for damage and only charge for items covered by the policy. Inspection is carried out by a third party to ensure that it’s fair and unbiased. We understand that cars are likely to have one or two small bumps during the length of your lease agreement, so we'll cover you for the first £150 worth of damage. Click here to view our Fair Wear and Tear policy for cars. We also understand that due to the nature of their use, vans are more susceptible to knocks and bumps, we have taken this into consideration and have created a separate Fair Wear and Tear Commercial Vehicle policy.
10. Mileage pooling
If you manage a fleet of business cars its very likely that some of the cars at the end of a lease will be over the annual mileage and some under, leaving you with potentially expensive excess mileage charges for a proportion of your returning fleet.
If you have a business fleet of 10 or more vehicles through Ayvens, you can pool the mileage of the cars coming back each calendar year so that any cars under the expected mileage can offset the miles of cars over the expected mileage leaving you with reduced or even zero, excess mileage charges.