Have you looked at how you fund your vans and trucks lately? If the answer is no, then you fall very much into the majority of businesses in the cleaning industry, and elsewhere.

According to reports the vast majority of companies never question the method they use to acquire vehicles – and need to take a new approach if they want to reduce costs and improve efficiency within their business.

There are only 3 choices available to cleaning companies when they need a vehicle: buy; lease or rent and research shows that the vast majority of businesses in the commercial cleaning sector, amongst other industries opt for one and never re-evaluate the decision.

Even businesses that made detailed studies into vehicle funding at some point, never go back to the issue to see if there is a better solution now the business has progressed.

Also entering into three year agreements may not be such a strong move today. With business models moving and changing year to year the shorter the contracts the better.

Commercial Cleaning businesses – and in other linked sectors such as health and safety and environmental services – are being encouraged to look at vehicle funding because studies show it will lead to more rental options being taken.

TLS Vehicle Rental ( which has 18,000 rental vans and trucks across the UK) believe rental has been looked at very much as a short term solution for van and truck needs but the truth is that the average length of rental has been increasing quickly in recent years and rentals of six months or longer now make up around half of our business.

For example,they say they are seeing increased hiring of relief vehicles for use when a customer’s owned or leased van is being serviced – but longer-term rental is where we are seeing the biggest growth.

TLS has developed a range of tools to help companies make a more informed decision about their choice of funding method on its web site. Here, an interactive character, iVan, gives short, factual presentations about the factors that should be kept in mind before committing to a particular route.

“What we are trying to do is get potential customers in the cleaning industry to look at the factors behind their current choice of acquisition method and compare different options,” says a spokeman.

“Our experience shows that, in these situations, rental often comes out as a good choice.”