The fuel card covers the diesel. Everything else — tolls paid cash, the tire repair at a shop that doesn't take cards, the scale ticket, the meal at the truck stop in Oklahoma because the company per diem ran out — comes out of your pocket and goes into a paper receipt pile in the door pocket. At the end of the month, that pile becomes a reimbursement conversation that you're going to lose some of.
Long-haul expense management fails at the same point for every independent operator and company driver: the receipts are physical, the reimbursement process is periodic, and the gap between incurring the cost and claiming it is where money disappears.
The Reimbursable/Reimbursed Pair
Reimbursable and Reimbursed are two separate boolean fields. The gap between them is the receivable — what's been approved for reimbursement but hasn't cleared yet. Filter for Reimbursable = Yes and Reimbursed = No and you have your current outstanding claims. That list is the document you bring to payroll, not a reconstructed memory of what you spent in February.
Status is the workflow field: submitted, pending, approved, paid. Combined with the Reimbursed flag, it gives you the full lifecycle of each expense claim. An approved claim that hasn't paid out is a different conversation than a claim that was never submitted.
Category and the Tax Record
Category — fuel, tolls, meals, repair, lodging, supplies, permits — is the classification that matters at tax time, not just at reimbursement time. For owner-operators, the expense record is a Schedule C input. Meals are subject to the 80% DOT deductibility rule. Tolls are fully deductible. Repairs are capital versus ordinary expense depending on the amount. Without category data on every expense, the tax preparation conversation with your accountant is longer and more expensive than it needs to be.
Purchase Date, Purchased At (location — city, state, truck stop name), and Purchased From (vendor name) together create the paper trail that an IRS audit requires. "I spent $340 on repairs in April" is not an audit response. "April 14th, $340, Loves Travel Stop #342, Grand Junction CO, receipt #4471, attached" is.
The Receipt Photo as the Foundation
Receipt Photo is the field that makes the mobile-first expense workflow work. You pull over, photograph the receipt, log the amount and category, and move on. The paper receipt goes in the trash. The photo is in the database with the location and the date.
Receipt Number is the cross-reference field for paper-based systems — some company expense processes require receipt numbers on submitted claims. The field captures it at the moment of entry rather than requiring you to go back and re-read a faded thermal receipt six weeks later.
Payment Type — cash, card, fuel card, company card — affects the reimbursement logic. Cash out-of-pocket and company card charges are handled differently in most carrier accounting systems. Having the payment type in the record prevents the common situation where a cash expense gets processed as a company card duplicate or vice versa.