One fuel line, dozens of purchases behind it
A carrier settlement statement almost never itemizes fuel purchase by purchase — it shows one deducted total for the period, deducted before the driver ever sees a breakdown. The actual detail — which station, which day, how many gallons, at what price — lives on a separate document entirely: the fuel card statement, issued by whichever provider the carrier or driver uses.
Reading a fuel card statement means turning that whole purchase history into structured data — not just the total, which the settlement already provides, but every purchase that produced it.
Why fuel card statements resist a simple template
Every provider lays it out differently
Comdata, EFS and TCH each organize the same underlying fields — station, date, gallons, price — in completely different table layouts, with different column names for the same concept.
A statement can cover several trucks at once
A fleet account's fuel card statement often lists every truck's purchases together, requiring each purchase to be attributed to the right unit rather than pooled into one total.
Non-fuel charges ride on the same card
Scale fees, truck washes, cash advances and even minor maintenance purchases often run through the same fuel card, mixed in among genuine fuel purchases.
The settlement's fuel line doesn't always match the card total exactly
A card fee, a purchase from a slightly different date range, or a rounding convention can create a small gap between the settlement's fuel deduction and the card statement's own total.
None of these four make a fuel card statement unusual or poorly designed — they're the normal variety across providers and account structures, and exactly why a fixed template built for one provider's layout tends to break the moment a driver switches cards.
What gets read
| Field | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Station and location | Where the purchase was made |
| Date and time | When the purchase occurred |
| Gallons purchased | Fuel volume for the transaction |
| Price per gallon | Rate applied to the purchase |
| Purchase total | Amount deducted for that transaction |
| Truck or unit number | Which vehicle the purchase belongs to, where shown |
Six fields, read as they actually appear on the statement in front of them — not inferred from a typical layout, and not assumed present if the statement genuinely doesn't itemize one of them.
How a purchase gets matched to the settlement
Matching runs by summing every fuel purchase in the fuel card statement's period and comparing that sum against the settlement statement's own fuel deduction line — not purchase by purchase against the settlement, since the settlement itself only ever shows the total.
Fuel, and everything that isn't fuel
A fuel card statement rarely contains only fuel. Scale fees, truck washes, parking, cash advances and occasional maintenance items commonly ride on the same card, and lumping them into a single "fuel" total would overstate actual fuel spend while understating everything else. Each purchase is read and categorized individually, so a scale fee stays a scale fee rather than quietly becoming part of the fuel number.
Confidence, not silent assumption
Every field extracted carries a confidence level rather than being treated as certain. A clearly printed purchase line on a clean digital statement reads at high confidence. A faded thermal-printed receipt scanned into a statement, or a purchase with an ambiguous station name, reads at a lower confidence and is flagged for a quick look rather than accepted without question.
When a purchase doesn't reconcile
Occasionally, the sum of fuel card purchases doesn't equal the settlement's printed fuel deduction — usually because of a card fee bundled into the line, a purchase that falls just outside the settlement's period boundary, or a rounding convention. That discrepancy is surfaced directly rather than silently reconciled by adjusting one of the numbers to force agreement.
Seeing the gap is usually enough to know what happened — a small card fee noted elsewhere on the statement, or a purchase dated a day before or after the settlement window that genuinely belongs to the adjacent period.
The check this runs every time
| Check | What it confirms |
|---|---|
| Gallons × price = purchase total | The base calculation for each individual fuel purchase |
| Sum of purchases = card statement total | Every purchase on the card statement is accounted for |
| Card total = settlement fuel deduction | The settlement's fuel line matches what was actually spent |
This is a consistency check against the statements' own printed math, not an audit of whether the price per gallon paid was competitive — that's a fuel-buying decision, not an arithmetic one.
How it works
Upload the fuel card statement
Any provider's format — PDF, scan or photo.
Every purchase is read
Station, date, gallons, price and category, kept linked to the statement it came from.
Summed and checked against the settlement
With a confidence level on every extracted purchase and a flag on anything that doesn't reconcile.
Export
Excel, CSV or JSON — one row per purchase, with fuel and non-fuel charges as separate categories.
Cash advances and non-fuel purchases on the same card
A cash advance drawn against the fuel card — common when a driver needs cash on the road for a lumper fee or an unexpected repair — shows up on the card statement looking similar to a fuel purchase, but it's a fundamentally different kind of transaction. It's read and categorized as its own line, distinct from fuel, so it doesn't quietly inflate the fuel total.
A week of fuel, matched
A single truck's fuel card statement for a one-week settlement period, five purchases.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| 5 fuel purchases, 412 gallons total | $1,772 |
| Scale fee | $14 |
| Cash advance | $100 |
| Total card deduction | $1,886 |
| Settlement fuel line | $1,772 |
The settlement statement deducted only $1,772 for fuel, which matches the five genuine fuel purchases exactly — the $14 scale fee and $100 cash advance were deducted separately elsewhere on the settlement, not folded into the fuel line. Without reading the fuel card statement's own breakdown, that $114 difference between the total card deduction and the settlement's fuel line would be easy to mistake for an error.
What accuracy actually looks like
A clean, digitally generated fuel card statement reads at high confidence across nearly every field. A statement with several manually keyed or corrected entries produces a larger review queue — not because the extraction is weaker, but because the source document itself carries more genuine ambiguity.
Across a typical settlement period with a mix of clean digital purchases, most drivers see somewhere between 85% and 95% of purchases land at high confidence, with the rest resolved in a short review rather than a full manual re-key.
What this means for IFTA, and what it doesn't
IFTA quarterly reporting requires fuel purchased per state alongside miles driven per state, and a clean, structured record of every fuel purchase with its station location is a genuinely useful input to that calculation. What this doesn't do is calculate the IFTA return itself — that requires mileage data this tool has no visibility into, and stays a separate step handled by your IFTA reporting service or your own records.
What comes out
Excel, CSV or JSON, structured so that station, date, gallons, price and category are their own column — not a single fuel total. That level of detail is what makes the export useful for more than a bookkeeping entry: it's the same breakdown a driver would need to spot-check fuel pricing across a route or feed an IFTA calculation.
Who this is for
Owner-operators reconciling weekly settlements
Every fuel deduction checked against the card statement, without re-keying station purchases by hand.
Small fleets with a shared fuel card account
Purchases attributed correctly per truck, even on a combined fleet statement.
Bookkeepers serving trucking clients
Fuel detail that drops directly into a categorized settlement record, regardless of which fuel card provider a client uses.
Drivers preparing IFTA documentation
A clean, structured record of fuel purchases by location as a starting input.
More than one fuel card on the same truck
It's not unusual for a driver to switch fuel card providers mid-year, or for a small fleet to run more than one card program across different trucks. Each card's statements are read on their own terms and can be combined into one overall fuel record, so switching providers doesn't break the continuity of a truck's fuel history.
What this doesn't do
Doesn't audit whether fuel prices were competitive
It confirms the card statement's own numbers are internally consistent — it doesn't second-guess the network's pricing at a given station.
Doesn't connect to a fuel card provider's account
There's no login, no API, no account connection. You download or receive the statement yourself and upload it here.
Doesn't calculate or file IFTA on your behalf
It provides clean fuel purchase data as an input — the mileage-side calculation and the filing itself stay with your IFTA process.
Seasonal fuel price swings and what they mean for matching
Fuel prices move with the season and with regional supply, which means a purchase's price per gallon is expected to vary from week to week even for the exact same station. The matching described on this page doesn't treat that variation as suspicious — it confirms the purchase totals add up correctly, regardless of whether the underlying price per gallon happened to be higher or lower than the same week a year earlier.
What is worth a second look is a price per gallon that's wildly out of line with every other purchase in the same statement, which is exactly the kind of outlier the confidence scoring is built to surface rather than smooth over.
Purchases spread across many states
A long-haul driver's fuel card statement for even a single week can span half a dozen states, each with its own fuel tax rate baked into the pump price. Reading every purchase with its station location intact — not just a total gallons figure — is what keeps that state-level detail available, which matters both for spotting an unusual purchase and for anyone using the data as an input to state-by-state fuel tax reporting.
How often to run this check
Matching the fuel card statement to the settlement every time a settlement arrives is the simplest habit that actually works — weekly for most drivers, biweekly for some. Waiting longer means several fuel card statements pile up before anyone checks whether the settlement's fuel deductions actually reconcile, and a discrepancy from several weeks back is far harder to trace than one caught immediately.
For a small fleet with several trucks on the same fuel card program, that same weekly rhythm applied across every truck at once is what keeps one truck's discrepancy from getting lost in the volume of the rest of the fleet's activity, where a single small truck's discrepancy can otherwise disappear inside a much larger total.
Tolls, parking and other card-adjacent charges
Beyond fuel and scale fees, some fuel cards also cover toll transponders or truck stop parking reservations, each showing up as its own small charge on the statement. These are read and categorized the same careful way as any other line — kept distinct from fuel rather than absorbed into it, so a driver comparing month-to-month fuel spend isn't inadvertently comparing a mix of fuel and unrelated incidental charges.
Individually, most of these charges are small enough to ignore, but across a full quarter they can add up to a meaningful category of their own — worth seeing clearly rather than folded silently into whatever category happens to be nearby on the statement, especially for a driver comparing costs across several months to spot a genuine trend rather than noise.