Fuel write-off: the Refuelling Log and the fuel-card statement

Writing fuel off is a paperwork problem before it is a fuel problem. The accountant needs to show, per vehicle and per period, what was bought, when, by whom, and against what mileage. Most fleets can produce three of those four; the fourth — mileage at the moment of purchase — is the one paper logs skip, and it is the one that makes the whole thing checkable.

What the Refuelling Log holds

One row per fuel or charging stop, across the whole fleet or one city, sorted by date. The columns are: date, city, internal number, plate, model, type, amount in litres or kWh, odometer at refuel, cost, location, and driver.

Litres and kilowatt-hours are totalled separately at the bottom. They are not added together, because a total of "litres plus kilowatt-hours" is not a quantity of anything.

The odometer field is the whole point

Take it out and the log becomes a list of purchases — you can prove money was spent, not that it was spent on driving. Leave it in and three checks become possible without any extra work: consumption between two consecutive fills, whether the distance between fills is plausible for the amount bought, and whether a fill happened at a moment the vehicle could not have been where the receipt says.

This is why the driver is asked for the reading at the pump rather than at the end of the day. A reading taken later is an estimate wearing the clothes of a fact.

Stops without a cost, and why they are visible

A driver almost never holds the invoice — the organisation is billed later, often by fuel card. So a stop is logged with quantity and odometer, and the cost arrives afterwards. Until it does, the stop is marked as pending: it is counted in the quantity totals and excluded from the money totals, and the Fleet Running Costs report highlights the affected cell.

The alternative — treating an unpriced stop as costing zero — is how a monthly fuel figure quietly comes out ten per cent low. It is better to be told the number is incomplete than to be given a wrong one confidently.

Filling the costs from a fuel-card statement

If you fuel on WOG cards, the statement already knows what every purchase cost. It just does not know which trip it belonged to. The driver app knows the trip; the statement knows the money. Importing the statement joins the two and fills in the cost on stops where it is still empty.

It runs as a preview, never blind. A statement line carries no trip identifier, so every link is inferred, and the matching rules are deliberately narrow — a wrong cost on the wrong vehicle is worse than no cost at all:

• the plate on the statement must resolve to exactly one vehicle, compared on normalised plates, because statements and fleet records both mix Cyrillic and Latin letters for the same registration;
• the trip date must fall within three days of the transaction date;
• the quantity must agree within half a litre or two per cent, whichever is the larger tolerance;
• liquid fuel only, and only stops whose cost is still empty;
• one statement line may claim one stop, and one stop may be claimed by one line.

Everything that does not resolve uniquely is handed back for a person to decide, rather than guessed at. Nothing is written until the preview is confirmed, and the whole operation is recorded in the audit log.

What this gives the accountant

A period export where every litre has a date, a vehicle, a driver, an odometer reading and a price, and where any gap is visible as a gap rather than absorbed into a total. That is the difference between a write-off that survives a question and one that starts an argument.

The one habit that makes it work

Ask for the odometer at the pump, every time, from day one. It is the single field that people skip when they are in a hurry and the single field that everything downstream depends on. Once the habit exists the reports assemble themselves; without it you have a very tidy list of receipts.

Depot 17 lets drivers log a refuelling stop from the phone in under a minute, with no signal if necessary, and turns those entries into a Refuelling Log and a fuel write-off pack. Register your organisation and try it on a month of real data.