Every year fleet managers and company accounting departments are asked to complete an enormous task. What they are asked to do is to integrate every point of purchase data for every truck in the fleet with the miles and locations that every truck in the fleet traveled. The people asking that this tax be completed are a group that manage the International Fuel Tax Agreement, or IFTA. This agreement exists because reporting when fleets criss-cross state lines over and over again can become very complicated. Before IFTA, fleets were required to obtain permits from every state along their route and then file a report detailing the amount of fuel used and miles traveled within that particular state line. Which wouldn’t be that terrible if every state didn’t have a different filing process making the task extremely difficult. So that’s the situation IFTA came into fix. With the implementation of the agreement, all permits and filing were all placed under the umbrella of a single source. With the burden eased, fleets were able to successfully file their fuel use for decades. However, with the invention of new technology filing for IFTA is about to become even easier.
Voyager, the massively popular fuel card distributor, has developed an API (application programming interface) that is purposed with integrating data points across platforms. In past articles we’ve written about how this API technology can be used to integrate GPS and fuel card data. Today, we’ll be discussing how that same technology can be used to integrate fuel card data and accounting software.
But first, let’s discuss how integration of this kind seeks to benefit the customer. As explained above, IFTA did wonders for fuel use reporting by slimming the entire process down to just one report. However, in order to file that single IFTA report a fleet manager still needed to complete a ridiculous amount of work. In order to compile all of the data required a fleet manager has to determine how many miles his trucks drove, on how much fuel, and in what states. Before Voyager’s API and the opportunity for cross-platform integration became available, a fleet manager would have to spend hours meticulously transferring data found on fuel card purchase receipts into their report. Now however, this painstaking process has been reduced to a near menial task. Because with the help of an API all fuel card data is made available instantly, all in one place ready to be compiled and sent to IFTA.
How To…
To integrate your accounting software with your fuel card data please do the following.
- Call us at CNRG Fleet, or whoever your fuel card provider is and let us know that you want to take advantage of API technology and what particular set of solutions you’re looking for.
- …
And that’s it! After you’ve called your us at CNRG Fleet, we will take care of the rest. Below is what steps they will take to get you all set up!
- Call Voyager and register your company with their API program.
- Once given access, we will select the desired integration solution (accounting) and refer them to the location the fuel card data is to be sent.
- Finally, we will notify your accounting department to inform them that Voyager will begin to send them fuel card data.