Fuel and mileage tracking for NGO fleets — without spreadsheets

In fleets all over Ukraine the same chain repeats every month. A driver fills in a paper waybill by hand for four weeks. At month end an accountant deciphers the handwriting in order to write the fuel off. A logistics officer then retypes the same numbers into a spreadsheet to produce a report. Three people handle one set of figures, nobody fully trusts the total, and it all lands the night before the deadline.

The fix is not telematics hardware. It is removing the retyping.

Why the spreadsheet is the weak link

A spreadsheet is an excellent calculator and a poor system of record. It usually lives on one laptop, so only one person can update it and a lost machine is a lost year. It has no idea what a vehicle or a driver is, so nothing stops the same trip being entered twice, or an odometer reading that is lower than the one before it. And it is filled in from memory days after the fact, which is where most of the error comes from — not from dishonesty, but from a driver reconstructing last Tuesday.

The cost is real and recurring. A logistics officer spending one to two days a month assembling fuel and mileage figures is a salary line, and the output is a number nobody can defend line by line if an auditor asks.

What actually has to be recorded

• Trips — date, driver, vehicle, route, odometer at start and end. Mileage is derived, never typed, so it cannot disagree with the odometer.
• Fuel and charging — litres or kWh per stop, cost, and the odometer reading at the moment of refuelling. That last field is the one paper logs skip, and the one that makes consumption calculable at all.
• Accountability — who was driving, and a passenger signature where the funder requires one.

Everything a monthly report needs is derivable from those three. Anything beyond them is optional detail.

Record it on the phone, offline

Field crews rarely have a stable connection, and a tool that demands one gets abandoned in its first week. An offline-first driver app lets a trip be recorded with no signal at all; the entry is stored on the phone and syncs by itself once the vehicle is back in coverage. Nothing is lost in a low-coverage area, and nothing has to be held in someone's memory until the evening.

This matters more than it sounds. Data entered at the moment of the trip is a record; data entered a week later is an estimate. Offline capture is what moves the month from the second category into the first.

The checks paper cannot do

Once trips and refuels are structured data, arithmetic that is tedious on paper becomes automatic:

• Odometer continuity — each trip starts where the previous one ended. A gap means a trip was never logged.
• Consumption per 100 km — litres against distance, per vehicle and per period. A vehicle drifting upward is either due for service or losing fuel somewhere.
• Refuelling against distance — a tank that could not physically have been burned over the distance covered shows up the same week, not at year end.

For a commercial owner this is the strongest argument of the lot, and it is worth saying plainly: phantom trips, siphoned fuel and padded odometer readings survive on paper because nobody has the hours to cross-check four weeks of handwriting. They do not survive a system that performs the cross-check on every entry.

Reports that come out finished

Because the underlying data is structured, the monthly output is generated rather than assembled: fleet running costs, driver days, a refuelling log, and per-vehicle PDFs, in English or Ukrainian. For a funded programme that is the donor report. For a company it is the fuel write-off pack the accountant has been asking for. The same records serve both — one entry by the driver, two different outputs.

What this does not do

Worth being direct about the shape of it. Depot 17 answers "what does this vehicle cost?" from three sources: fuel, the cost recorded against each service and wash, and — where a vehicle is rented and a daily rate is set — rental. The Fleet Running Costs report totals all three per vehicle per month. What it is not is a maintenance system: there are no work orders, no parts or stock, no supplier invoices, and insurance is not a field of its own, so it shares the service column with whatever you record there. If you need a workshop module, this is not one; if you need a defensible monthly cost per vehicle, that is exactly what it produces.

Price and trial

The core price is €8 per vehicle per month, with no minimum per organisation. The contracts register comes with any paid plan and the assets module is priced by capacity; the pricing page has the details. Two payment routes at the same price — an annual invoice paid by bank transfer, which is what most funded organisations need in order to get through procurement, or monthly by card. One renewal date applies to the whole account.

The trial is 2 vehicles and 1 dispatch driver for 30 days. Two vehicles rather than one is deliberate: a single vehicle cannot demonstrate a fleet report.

Start

Depot 17 is designed for field conditions: trips are logged offline, and the reports come out in the formats donors and auditors ask for. Register your organisation and try it — no card required to start.