A fuel card is a payment card that a company gives its drivers to pay for fuel at the petrol pump, with each purchase checked against the vehicle and the driver. It is also called a fleet card. It is a special kind of corporate card.
Fuel is one of the largest costs for a trucking company or a delivery fleet. If drivers pay in cash and claim the money back later, it is hard to check every bill. A driver could fill a private vehicle, or a pump could write a bill for more litres than it pumped. A fuel card controls this at the moment of payment.
Each card is linked to one vehicle or one driver. The company sets the rules in advance. For example, it can allow only diesel, set a limit for each fill, and allow fills only at pumps on the truck's route. At the pump, the attendant enters the amount on the card machine. Many fuel cards also ask for the odometer reading, the number of kilometres the vehicle has run.
Consider a transport company in Namakkal that runs 60 trucks. One truck has a rule of at most 300 litres a fill. The driver fills 250 litres of diesel at ₹100 a litre, which is ₹25,000. The card system records the litres, the price, the pump and the odometer reading of 1,84,320 km. The truck has run 1,000 km since its last fill, so it averaged 4 km a litre. That is normal for this truck, so the fill is not flagged. If the same truck had used 400 litres for 1,000 km, the system would flag the fill for a fleet manager to check.
The fuel card data is most useful when it is combined with other data. A fleet management system tracks each truck by GPS. It can check that the truck was actually at the pump when the card was used. The vehicle data that makes this possible is called telematics. The pump records the same sale in its own fuel station management software. Owners of a few trucks often see their fuel spending in a trucking app for owners.
In India, the large oil marketing companies issue their own fleet cards, which work at their own petrol pumps. Some companies that offer fleet cards to truck owners also offer FASTag, India's electronic toll payment system. And at some petrol pumps, a truck can pay for fuel from its FASTag balance.