Fuel Card Reconciliation Log

Volume fraud (filling beyond the truck's tank capacity — the surplus went elsewhere), location fraud (purchases where the truck wasn't, from card sharing or skimmed data), timing fraud (duplicate fills within hours, fills on off days), product fraud (non-fuel purchases or premium products coded as diesel), and slow-bleed theft (modest extra gallons every fill, invisible without MPG tracking). Most are caught by four cross-checks: gallons vs tank size, location vs GPS/ELD, transaction timing vs duty status, and computed MPG vs the unit's baseline. None require special software — just consistent reconciliation.

Compute each unit's MPG between fills: miles since last fill (odometer at fill, which most cards capture) divided by gallons purchased. Each truck has a stable baseline — typically 6–7.5 MPG for a Class 8 — moving predictably with load, terrain and season. A sustained drop with no mechanical cause means gallons are leaving without miles: theft, card misuse or a genuine fuel-system problem (either way, worth finding). The prerequisite is honest odometer entry at every fill; drivers keying nonsense odometers defeats the check, so enforce entry accuracy as policy.

Match the controls to a working truck's reality: product restrictions (diesel, DEF, maybe oil — not merchandise or premium gasoline), per-transaction and per-day gallon limits sized to tank capacity, transaction count limits (one or two fills a day), geographic/network restrictions where lanes are predictable, prompts for odometer and unit number, and real-time alerts for declines and limit hits. Issue cards per driver or per unit (per-unit plus driver PIN gives the cleanest attribution). Controls don't replace reconciliation — they shrink the space fraud can operate in and create the data reconciliation uses.

Weekly, not monthly. A month of fleet transactions is a wall of numbers where patterns hide; a week is reviewable in minutes per truck, while routes and receipts are still fresh enough to verify. Weekly cadence also caps the loss window — a compromised card caught in week one costs a fraction of one discovered at statement time. The rhythm: pull transactions, run the four checks (volume, location, timing, MPG), flag and assign anything off, and close flags with a finding — 'confirmed issue' or cleared. Ten disciplined minutes per week per handful of trucks is the cheapest fuel saving available.