If you have looked into starting a fuel program for your business, you have probably heard of a fuel card, but what is it and how do fuel cards work?

At first, most people think a fuel card is just some fancy credit card. Sure it looks like a credit card, it’s even used like a credit card, but a fuel card is much more than just a piece of plastic.

A fuel card is a payment method used by companies to track and control their driver’s fuel purchases at commercial fuel stations, gas stations, and truck stops. Well that’s great, but I know what you’re thinking, how does a fuel card do all of this?

Here’s a quick 5 step explanation of how fuel cards work which is further explained in the infographic below.

1. Setup fuel card controls to limit drivers to only purchase fuel when you want them to.
2. At the pump driver enters pin, odometer, and truck number.
3. Immediately after the driver is done fueling, you’ll receive an e-receipt with the transaction details.
4. At the end of a billing period you’ll receive an organized invoice.
5. At anytime you can login to your online fuel card account to create reports such as monthly fuel expense reports and quarterly IFTA tax reports.

After scanning through the infographic, you should have a good idea of how fuel cards work from start to finish. But what should you expect to see when you receive an e-receipt, fuel report, or invoice?

Here’s some examples of the following tools taken directly from our CFN fuel card.

E-receipts get emailed to you after your driver hangs up the nozzle so that way you know what your drivers are purchasing immediately.

This is an example of a transaction report that will help you total up your transactions to create fuel expense reports or even help file your quarterly IFTA reports.

The fuel invoice you receive should be organized and easy to read. Some fuel card companies allow you to customize your invoice to fit your company’s organization. For example, you can separate purchases by department like fleet, sales, and management, so you can easily allocate cost to each department without sifting through transactions.

I hope that answered most of your questions about how do fuel cards work. If you want to learn more, check out our fuel card programs. You can also use our fuel card finder to find the best fuel card for your company.