Fuel and IFTA
Record distance by jurisdiction and the fuel bought in each one, and get the worksheet your quarterly return is filled in from.
Fuel & IFTA, under Fleet, holds the two things a quarterly return is built from: how far your trucks drove in each jurisdiction, and how much tax-paid fuel you bought in each one. Everything else on a return is arithmetic over those two numbers.
The screen does not calculate tax owing and it does not file anything. Tax rates are published per jurisdiction, per fuel type, per quarter, and they change every quarter — a rate stored here would go stale quietly and put a wrong number on a tax document. Take the net litres from this screen and apply the current published rate when you file.
Where the distance comes from
If your trucks are on a connected fleet system, choose the quarter and press Pull distance. The device watched every border crossing as it happened, which is a better record than a map and a memory three months later. Only units you have matched under Telematics are pulled; anything unmatched is counted and reported rather than guessed at. Samsara reports this straight from its own IFTA report, so a Samsara pull is one call rather than a month at a time.
A quarter is fetched a month at a time, because Geotab works this report out on demand and a whole quarter across a fleet can be more than it will answer in one go. If a month is still too much, that month is asked for one vehicle at a time. Anything that still does not come back is named in the result so you can run it again — what already arrived is kept and will not be duplicated.
A unit with no telematics device gets its distance entered by hand under the Distance tab, in kilometres or miles. Both kinds of row sit in the same list and each says where it came from.
Reading a receipt or a card statement
Under the Fuel tab, photograph a fuel receipt and the date, quantity, cost, location and vendor are read off it. If you have a fleet fuel card, the better route is the monthly statement: drop the PDF in and every transaction on it comes back at once, which is the difference between IFTA taking an afternoon and taking a week.
Nothing is saved from a scan on its own. Each purchase is shown for you to check, with anything that could not be read marked in red, and a row will not save while something on it is unsettled. Choose which unit each purchase was for — a truck number scribbled on a truck stop receipt is not an identifier, so it is shown to help you rather than used to decide.
A date printed as 03/04/26 is 3 April in one convention and 4 March in another, and three times a year those fall in different quarters. Where the document does not make it clear, you are asked rather than guessed at. The same care applies to gallons: a US receipt in gallons stored as litres would overstate your credit by nearly four times, and it would look completely ordinary on the screen afterwards.
Adding one by hand
You can also enter a purchase yourself: the unit, the date, where it was bought, how much, and the receipt. Litres, US gallons or imperial gallons, Canadian or US dollars — it converts and stores everything in litres so nothing has to remember which side of the border a row came from.
Attach the receipt when you enter the purchase. An auditor disallows a litre it cannot see a receipt for, which turns a credit into a liability, and finding a receipt three years later is harder than photographing it now. Any purchase without one is flagged in the list.
Fuel from your own bulk tank is usually bought without road tax on it. Set Tax paid at the pump to No for those. They still count as fuel your fleet burned, but they earn no credit — claiming one is an audit finding.
Reading the summary
The summary works out your fleet average for the quarter from total distance and total fuel, then applies that single figure to each jurisdiction’s taxable distance to say how much fuel was burned there. Net litres is fuel burned in a jurisdiction minus tax-paid fuel bought there: red means you owe that jurisdiction tax on those litres, green means a credit is due to you. Across all jurisdictions the column adds to zero, because every litre burned was bought somewhere.
Worth checking first
A missing fuel receipt does not leave a visible hole — it lowers your fleet average, which moves every jurisdiction on the return at once. So the screen names the things that go wrong while every total still looks fine: a unit that recorded distance but no fuel, a unit that bought fuel but recorded no distance, and an average that has come out impossibly high or low. Clear those before you file.
Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Alaska, Hawaii and the District of Columbia are not IFTA members. Distance driven in them is still recorded and still counts toward your fleet average, because your trucks burned fuel over it — it is simply not reported on the return. Those lines are marked so you do not include them by accident.
The whole quarter downloads as a CSV, and the quarter you are viewing is in the page address, so a worksheet can be sent to whoever does your filing as a link.
A long list shows the first 250 entries and says how many it is standing in for. That is about how much is drawn on the screen, not about the arithmetic — the summary and the CSV count every record in the quarter.
The fleet average is held back until enough fuel is recorded for it to mean anything. Your distance arrives from the fleet system in one go and your fuel arrives a receipt at a time, so early in a quarter the ratio is always wrong and always wrong the same way — a fleet that has driven 40,000 km on one recorded tank is not doing 2 L/100km. Until it settles the tile reads Not yet and says which half it is short of: no fuel against the distance, no distance against the fuel, or only part of the quarter’s receipts in so far. It is waiting for you, not broken.
A quarter that shows nothing should be taken at face value only once you have saved something into it. If you have added fuel or pulled distance and the tabs still read zero, that is a fault rather than an empty quarter — tell us. The screen now reports an error when it cannot load, instead of quietly showing zero, because on a tax worksheet a wrong zero is the one nobody questions.