- 02 | 12 | 2025
If you’re responsible for a fleet – delivery vans, local authority vehicles, hire cars or commercial vehicles – managing penalty charge notifications (PCNs) will be a familiar problem. And it’s only getting worse. Private parking firms handed out 14.4m tickets over the twelve months to March 2025. That’s more than double the number issued six years ago [1].
With each PCN costing up to a cap of £100 [2], the cost to UK drivers (before appeals or early payment discounts) is £1.4bn.
Paying fines promptly, appealing unfair decisions, and allocating charges to the correct drivers is vital for cost-effective fleet management. However, when time is short and budgets are tight, finance teams, fleet administrators and others tasked with accurately processing thousands of PCNs per month find themselves under increasing pressure.
Despite the impact PCN management has on profitability, customer service, employee satisfaction and organisational efficiency, fleet operators often have to resort to manual workarounds and siloed systems.
Until recently, the only options for handling PCNs, penalties and fines for large fleets of vehicles were: 1) manually or 2) using a third-party system. Both come with drawbacks.
Ticket issuers are becoming more sophisticated in their use of technology but fleets aren’t keeping up. While councils and parking operators are investing in AI and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce low emission zones, congestion charge areas, and parking violations, many fleet operators are relying on people power to manage the fines. Employees using spreadsheets, basic software tools and email are expected to keep pace with the flood of PCNs, which account for 52% of all fines across fleets [1].
The other option open to fleet managers is a standalone PCN management system. These tools are specifically designed to automate the process of information capture, allocation and appeals. While PCN tools speed up the process, they sit outside the fleet organisation’s IT domain. Using a siloed system not only raises data protection and security considerations, but make it harder to track regular patterns or PCN hotspots in order to fix root causes.
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2,300
parking fines have been issued to private ambulances driving through low traffic neighbourhoods and bus lanes in London.
The prompt payment of fines is just one aspect of PCN management. Sometimes PCNs are issued unfairly and need to be challenged.
Even emergency services aren’t exempt from penalties. Several media outlets reported earlier this year that 2,300 parking fines have been issued to private ambulances driving through low traffic neighbourhoods and bus lanes in London. One private provider used by several NHS trusts has paid up to £1,000 a week in fines, but doesn’t appeal, because “the process is more effort than it is worth”[1].
If appeals were easier to process, more organisations might successfully challenge penalties. The savings in fines could be enormous.
Fire-fighting
When fleets are managing PCNs manually or in standalone systems, tickets can feel like random bad luck. Administrators don’t have visibility of patterns, problem drivers or the locations which are most prone to cause problems.
If PCN information could be easily integrated with data from other systems – relating to routes, drivers, vehicles and finance – the savings could be significant. Fleet administrators and finance teams would be able to use the learnings from detailed, cross-referenced reports to make positive strategic changes rather than constantly working on reactive PCN management.
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OASIS FileSmart is an enterprise-grade Microsoft 365 add-on that automates the PCN process from receipt to payment or appeal, with configurable rules, integrations with in-house systems (HR, finance, driver management) – and all without data ever leaving your IT environment.
Reads any paper ticket, email or photo, extracts relevant data, and automatically routes it to the right person or system, without human intervention.
OASIS FileSmart is an enterprise-grade Microsoft 365 add-on that automates the PCN process from receipt to payment or appeal, with configurable rules, integrations with in-house systems (HR, finance, driver management) – and all without data ever leaving your IT environment.
Direct integration with finance, HR, and fleet systems means PCNs flow into existing processes. No double entry, no delays.
FileSmart automates liability transfers (where fleet operators allocate fines to drivers), appeals, and payments, with audit trails for compliance purposes. Nothing slips through the cracks.
Detailed reports show which drivers, routes, and locations generate the most tickets.
If you’re managing PCNs manually, or logging into multiple systems, stop. Building an automated PCN process based on existing Microsoft 365 tools with FileSmart can slash the time it takes to pay fines and submit appeals. Your fleet administrators will get hours back in their day. Your IT team will thank you for keeping all data secure within your own domain. And integrations with HR and finance tools, along with detailed reporting, make your fleet miles more cost-effective in the long term.
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Discover how automated PCN processing can save your fleet time, reduce costs, and keep your data source.
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