Fuel write-offs: proving every single fill

At the end of the month one fuel network invoice lands on the accountant's desk: a total, VAT, and anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred lines — date, time, card, station, litres. The invoice is paid and the cost is written off. The question that is hardest to answer sounds simple: does every line on that invoice have some record behind it? In practice it only gets checked once somebody else is already asking.

Two different burdens that are easy to confuse

Fuel paperwork answers two separate questions, and most companies only have an answer to the first. Question one: can the fuel be treated as a deductible cost? Here the Lithuanian tax authority's position is comfortable — the company itself decides which documents record fuel consumption (a write-off act, a consumption report, a trip log), and the cost can be recognised even without trip logs.

Question two: was the car used privately? A monthly summary does not answer that. This one needs detail — who drove, where, to which client, for what purpose, how many kilometres. It is also the expensive question, because the answer leads to personal income tax and VAT, not just a disallowed cost.

What the tax authority actually looks at

When deciding whether a car was used in the business, the whole picture is assessed:

• •whether the car is genuinely needed for the company's or the employee's work
• •whether there is objective evidence — trip logs, contracts, business-trip documents, waybills
• •where the car is kept outside working hours
• •when and where the fuel was bought

That last point puts the fuel invoice in a new light. It is the one document where every purchase carries an exact date, time and station — and the one nobody inside the company edits. If a fill happened on a day when, by your own records, nobody drove that car, that is a question worth answering yourself now rather than a year later.

Fills that belong to no car at all

The fuel card is what ties a purchase to a specific vehicle. Until a card is assigned, its fills are paid for and written off but belong to nobody — they appear in no car's costs. Usually for a mundane reason: the card was issued before anyone recorded it.

Ezura shows those lines first, at the top of the invoice, not buried at the bottom. And when the card is finally assigned to a vehicle, its earlier fills are re-attributed too, not just future ones — otherwise past months keep a permanent hole.

At month end: how many lines have a record behind them

Instead of comparing two piles of paper, every line of the fuel invoice states its own status: written in the trip log, a different quantity in the log, not in the log, no log at all, or not yet assigned to a car. Each vehicle shows its ratio, and the month shows how much of its fuel has a document behind it.

One detail matters more than it looks. An invoice dated 31 July often covers purchases from late June, so the check runs against the month the fuel was bought, not the month of the invoice — one car's lines on a single invoice can belong to two different trip logs. By hand this is almost never checked correctly, and that is where the missing litres nobody can explain come from.

Credit notes and copies of the same invoice

Fuel networks reissue documents: a credit note, then a fresh document for the same period. A supplier may also send the same invoice twice. If litres are simply added up, a car suddenly has to account for twice the fuel — or too little — and the month gets flagged as a mismatch for no reason.

So those lines are marked separately — credit note, offset, duplicate — and stay out of the number that says how much fuel needs substantiating. What you are looking at stays what that car actually bought.

Do the lines add up to the invoice itself?

Before asking whether every fill has a record, it is worth knowing that the lines themselves were read correctly. Where the fuel network invoice prints a total for each card, the fills are checked against it: each card's lines must add up to that card's total, and all of them together to the invoice amount. Such an invoice is marked as checked against its card totals. Where the check could not be made — a scanned invoice, say, or an unfamiliar layout — that is said too, and the invoice can be read again. So you know which litres, the ones a driver signs for, can be relied on, and which are worth a look yourself.

The same invoice does not need to reach the books as a hundred lines. A supplier rule can be set to book one line per fuel card: each card's petrol, diesel and other purchases (car wash, AdBlue) become separate lines at each VAT rate — the same merge many accountants do by hand for card statements. The individual fills do not disappear: they stay visible under each car and are still checked against the trip logs.

Not every fill comes on the monthly fuel invoice — sometimes a driver brings back only a station till receipt. A till receipt is usually not a VAT invoice, so it is worth asking for one straight away. The exception is a fuel station receipt of up to 150 euros that carries a machine-printed buyer identifier, such as the company's fuel card number: that receipt counts as a VAT invoice.

The route field is the one that costs the most

Drivers record litres carefully and leave the route box empty, or fill it in generically: driving on business. But litres only decide the amount you write off; the route decides the private-use question, the one that leads to tax. The tidiest-looking log can be useless exactly where it is needed most.

Rows created from a fuel invoice arrive carrying the time of the fill and the station name, so the driver has something to work from instead of recalling a day from three weeks ago. Empty route boxes are highlighted, and before a log is submitted the rows still missing a route are listed. If private use is already declared as a benefit in kind, this question looks different for you — but then it should be a deliberate decision, not an empty box.

Fuel norms: having an order is not the same as justifying one

Fuel consumption norms have to be technically justified — from the manufacturer's data or from the company's own reliable methodology. Lithuania's state methodology for setting car fuel norms was repealed in 2015 and, even while it was in force, was only advisory, so copying its table into a director's order is not in itself a justification.

The practical consequence is simple: until a car has a norm, over-norm fuel cannot even be calculated. And over-norm fuel has more than one consequence — it is not deductible and, depending on the circumstances, can become income in kind and affect VAT deduction. Cars with no norm and no order are shown as their own list, and that is the list worth closing first.

Fuel accounting in a company: what the documents must show

There is no single state-prescribed way to account for fuel in Lithuania — each company sets up its own. That is why it is worth writing the procedure down in one director's order, so the answers do not depend on which accountant happens to be on duty that month. The order only needs to answer a few questions:

• •which document records the fuel used — a trip sheet, a write-off act or a consumption report — and how often (usually monthly);
• •what each car's fuel norm is and what it is based on;
• •which fuel card belongs to which car or person;
• •who fills in the document, who approves it, and by which day;
• •what happens to over-norm fuel and to fuel bought without a card.

At month end the documents have to form one chain: the fills on the fuel invoice match what the document records as filled, the kilometres driven at the norm give the fuel used, and the balance left in the tank carries over into the next month. Wherever that chain breaks is where the audit questions come from.

Can fuel be written off without trip sheets?

Yes. The tax authority's position is that the company itself chooses which document, approved by responsible persons, records fuel consumption, so the cost can be recognised without trip sheets — on a monthly write-off act, for example. But an act only answers the first question: how much fuel was used in the business. It does not answer the second, whether the car was used privately; that needs routes and the purpose of each trip. Where employees drive the company's cars, a trip sheet is the cheapest way to close that question.

Fuel accounting in Excel: when it is enough

For one or two cars, an Excel sheet with two formulas — kilometres from the odometer readings and fuel at the norm — plus the monthly fuel balance is enough. Once there are ten cars or more, most of the work is no longer filling in but checking: every fill against the fuel invoice, every balance against last month. That checking is exactly what Ezura does for you, as described above.

What you need to prepare

• •a list of fuel cards mapped to vehicles (and to a person where a card is personal)
• •a director's order on fuel norms, with a technical justification behind it
• •trip logs, or whichever document you have chosen, for the cars that also need to answer the private-use question
• •the fuel network invoices arriving by email — they keep arriving exactly where they do today

Everything else comes out of the invoice: the total is expanded into individual fills, each fill appears under its own car, and at month end you see a number rather than a feeling — how much of the fuel you bought has a record behind it, and which lines do not.