3 Ways Your Fuel Program Is Losing Money (and How Digital Payments Can Help)

By: Rich Taute

Fuel is the largest operating expense for most commercial fleets, estimated at $0.48 per mile in 2024. At that scale, even small inefficiencies add up to real money. And the price on the pump is only the beginning.

The full cost of your fuel program includes three major factors beyond the fuel itself: fraud and misuse that drain your spend directly, out-of-network purchases that bypass your negotiated rates and time lost to operational friction.

The good news? Digital payments technology has matured to the point that one platform can help address all three. Here’s how.

Fraud: More Than Just Card Skimming

The Headline Threat: Card Skimming

The version of fuel fraud everyone knows is card skimming: fraudsters hide a device in the pump reader to capture card data, clone the card and use it for fraudulent purchases. The FBI estimates skimming costs businesses and consumers over $1 billion a year, and trucking is a favorite target.

Why? Because a cloned fleet card is about as close to cash as stolen data gets. Commercial fuel transactions commonly run between $400 and $600, and diesel is easy to resell. A scammer with a copy of your card can repeatedly pump fuel on your account and sell it at a discount until somebody notices.

The traditional defenses don't completely fix the problem. You can train drivers to spot tampered pumps, but good skimming hardware is designed to be invisible. Daily spend caps limit the damage, but a scammer who stays under the cap can keep drawing on an account for weeks.

The Bigger Problem: Internal Misuse

But external attacks are still the smaller portion of what fleets lose. Industry research has found that roughly 80% of fuel losses come from internal misuse by authorized users, not outside criminals, whether unintentional or deliberate:

• Non-fleet fueling: A driver pumps fuel into a personal vehicle, or someone else's truck, on your account.
• Cards that outlive their drivers: Accounts left active after a driver leaves.

It’s still fraud, but it’s coming from inside the house, and there’s no criminal hardware involved. The only sign might be a transaction recorded at an odd place and time. 

How does that much money go missing without anyone noticing?

It comes down to how most fuel programs work. Charges come in all month and get reviewed in bulk weeks later on a credit card statement. Even a careful review may not catch much because a bad charge looks like any other fuel purchase. So, losses are estimated, which is how you end up with an industry that can’t say for sure where money is draining.

Digital payments help shut down the external and internal sides of the problem at the same time. A transaction initiated by app and authorized by a secure, single-use code leaves no card info for a skimmer to steal. And because every transaction is verified and visible the moment it happens, misuse loses the weeks-long blind spot it hides in. Most misuse can’t survive real-time visibility.

Spend Leakage: Losses Hidden in Plain Sight

Fraud and misuse at least look like losses once you find them, as opposed to out-of-network spend, which never does because every individual transaction is legitimate. You just paid more than you had to for it because you’re not getting the discount you negotiated with your merchant network. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of stops a month and the difference between negotiated and rack pricing adds up to a serious cost.

The math is worth doing, even roughly. Say you’re a mid-size fleet operating 50 trucks, each burning around 1,500 gallons of diesel per month, for a total of 75,000 gallons. If 10% of fueling happens out-of-network at a price 25 cents per gallon above your negotiated rate, you’re paying $1,875 a month more than you should.

That’s $22,500 in losses annually. Your numbers will obviously be different, but the problem works the same way for every fleet.

The traditional answer is policy: route guides, approved location lists and reminders from dispatch. The limitation of policy is that it depends entirely on voluntary compliance at the moment of purchase, by drivers who may be unaware or behind schedule.

A digital payments platform has enforcement essentially baked-in. Drivers fuel through an app built around your approved network:

• Location search shows only in-network stops, so the approved path is the only option.
• Pricing is visible before the stop, not discovered at the pump.
• Purchase controls apply at authorization, before the transaction completes.

Friction: Time is Money

The third factor is the easiest to miss, because it doesn’t show up on an invoice.

Fleets spend unnecessary time managing payment logistics, and that’s time not spent moving freight. Waiting for cards in the mail, installing hardware on trucks and even just getting out of the cab to pay all add up to significant unproductive time eating into your fixed hours of service.

The same cost hits your back office, too. Staff has to order and inventory cards and hardware, distribute them to drivers and trucks, replace them when lost or broken and shut them off when a driver leaves. That time adds up, and it grows with your fleet.

This is where digital payments deliver value that has nothing to do with security: there’s no card or hardware to wait for and manage. A driver downloads the app on the phone they already have, logs in and fuels. A new driver can fuel the day they’re hired and off-boarding is as simple as deactivating their account.

Fueling isn’t the only stop that can get the time-saving treatment. Weighing is a fixture of commercial routes, and the process is often less efficient than it could be: pull in, park, walk inside, pay, walk back. QuikQ’s integration with CAT Scale puts that transaction in the cab, letting the driver weigh and pay from the app without ever leaving the truck, through the same account that covers fuel. And for fleet managers, consolidating fuel and scale transactions on one platform means one less system to manage.

One Platform for Three Problems

All of these costs can be reduced with the same few capabilities: control over every transaction, visibility as it happens and no cards or extra systems to manage. That’s the practical case for digital payments: the same platform stopping fraud also keeps drivers on your network and gets them on the road faster.

How does your current program measure up? Ask yourself these questions:

• Fraud detection: How much is your fleet affected by fraud today? Andhow long before someone catches a fraudulent transaction?
• Network discipline: How much of your fueling happens off-network?
• Operational overhead: How many hours are spent on payment logistics, like getting new drivers ready to fuel or managing cards and hardware?

Struggling to answer these questions may indicate you’re losing money when you shouldn’t be. If you’re trying to figure out where your fuel program could be tightened up, digital payments can help across the board.

Rich Taute is the Vice President of Sales at QuikQ. A knowledgeable and passionate advocate of the transportation industry, Rich uses his vast years of experience as a sales and operations leader to help fleets and carriers across the country drive revenue and results while focusing on security.