Fuel

Fuel is the single largest variable expense in owner-operator trucking. You can't control diesel rack pricing. You can control where you fuel, whether you're riding a rebate program that's actually being honored, and whether your actual MPG is trending down before it turns into a blown injector. None of that is visible without stop-by-stop records.

The Gap Between the Pump Receipt and the Real Number

The pump cost is not your fuel cost. For an owner-operator running a rebate program — whether through NASTC, DAT, or a carrier fuel program — the spread between rack price and your contracted CPG can swing $0.15 to $0.60 per gallon. On 200 gallons of truck fuel plus 80 gallons of reefer, that spread is $46 to $136 per stop. Across a week with four fuel stops, that's potentially $184 to $544 that either shows up in your account or quietly doesn't.

The Rebate Paid radio field — "Rebate Paid" or "Rebate Not Paid" as a default — is the mechanism that makes this trackable. Every record has a status. At month end, you filter Rebate Paid = "Rebate Not Paid" and see exactly which stops are outstanding. The Total Rebate Received field captures the actual dollar amount when it hits. The Expected Truck Rebate Amount — calculated as Total Pump Cost Truck minus Expected Total Truck with Rebate — shows you the theoretical rebate per stop based on your contracted CPG. When the actual rebate doesn't match the expected rebate over multiple stops, you have a provable discrepancy rather than a feeling that something is off.

City Fueled and State Fueled are two separate text fields, not a single location. That distinction matters for IFTA. Gallons purchased and miles driven per state are the core data the quarterly IFTA report requires. If you're logging fuel stops anyway, logging city and state at the same time costs nothing and saves three hours of reconstruction work at quarter-end when you're trying to figure out how many gallons you pumped in Texas versus Oklahoma.

Where the MPG Signal Lives

The Fuel MPG calculated field — Total Miles Truck divided by Truck Gallons — is the most diagnostic number in the record. The automation script in this template pulls the previous entry's Odometer reading into Previous Truck Mileage automatically on entry creation. Total Miles Truck is Odometer minus Previous Truck Mileage. You enter the current odometer once. Everything else calculates.

The DEF block runs a parallel calculation: Previous DEF Mileage (the odometer at the last DEF fill), Total Miles DEF, Total Gallons DEF, and DEF MPG. A modern Tier 4 diesel engine runs roughly 50 to 60 miles per gallon of DEF at highway speeds with a lightly loaded trailer. If your DEF MPG drops below 40, either your injector is failing or you've got a NOx sensor reading incorrectly. Tracking DEF MPG per fill catches that trend eight to twelve weeks before it becomes a DEF pump replacement at the worst possible location on I-80 in Wyoming at 2am.

The Reefer section is deliberately simple: Gal Reefer and Total Pump Cost Reefer. Reefer fuel economy varies too much by load temperature setpoint, ambient temperature, and unit age to make per-stop MPG calculations meaningful. What matters is cost. The Reefer Cost and Rebate section calculates Expected Total Reefer with Rebate using the same Expected CPG field as the truck — most rebate programs apply to all diesel at the stop, including reefer.

Reading the Stop After You Pull Out

Fill Up Truck is a boolean field. When it's checked, the Fuel MPG figure is reliable — you're measuring gallons against a known full-tank baseline. When it's unchecked, the MPG is a partial calculation and shouldn't be compared directly against full fill-up records for trend analysis.

After thirty records, sort by Fuel MPG descending. The top performers will cluster around a specific load type and route corridor. The bottom performers correlate with either headwind legs, urban congestion runs, or the three stops that happened within two days of each other at low mileage intervals — which suggests either short-haul work or a fuel efficiency problem that started at a specific date.

That date is in the log. So is the city, the state, the pump cost, and whether the rebate ever came through.