Company Gas Cards Vs. Fuel Cards For Personal Use

When you are fueling your car at your local gas station you’ll probably see advertisements on the pump for all kinds of different gas cards, some for businesses and some for personal use. But what’s the difference between company gas cards and fuel cards for personal use?

Good question. It’s can be super confusing because fuel cards are all pieces of plastic that look like a credit card, so the advertisements can make it seem like it’s the same fuel card just used for different purposes.

But there is actually a pretty huge difference between company gas cards and fuel cards for business use.

So let’s start with fuel cards for personal use.

A personal fuel card is basically a credit card that usually offers a discount at a certain brand of gas station to promote loyalty to a specific gas brand.

Think of a credit card you might have from a big name department store like Target, Macy’s, or Nordstrom that gives you a discount off every purchase when you use their card at their store. Personal fuel cards are the exact same thing for gas.

Company gas cards are used to track and control company fuel purchases at gas stations.

Let’s imagine you own a bakery that has five delivery vans that run around town all day. Eventually the vans need to be filled up, so you pass around the company credit card to get gas and then you collect the fuel receipts for proof of purchase and for your expense reports.

Months go by and you start noticing a trend that one driver is buying a significant amount of more fuel than your other drivers, but drives the same distances, routes, etc.. Is there a hole in the gas tank or is your company credit card being used to purchase fuel for the employee’s personal vehicle as well?

So what do you do? Well you can wake up every morning before your drivers get to the shop and drive every van one by one to get fuel at the gas station. But that takes time away from you focusing on growing your business, not to mention it’s a pain.

That’s where a company gas card comes in handy. You can assign each company gas card to the driver or the vehicle and setup gallon limits, time frame limits, number of transaction per day limits, etc. to make sure your drivers can only purchase fuel when you want them to.

To be even more on top of it you can get purchase alerts emailed to your phone as soon as your driver gets done fueling at the gas station, so you always know what’s being purchased. Not to mention fuel cards can only buy fuel, not anything and everything like a credit card can purchase.

To make it even easier on yourself, company gas cards will accumulate all your fuel transactions into an online account, which will help you create monthly fuel expense reports, yearly reports for you taxes at end of the year, etc..

Now imagine if you own a trucking company, bus company, construction company, or a local delivery and you manage 10, 100’s, or 1,000’s of vehicles and drivers. That’s what a company gas card is made for.