Fleet Card Statement to Fuel Tax Credit Spreadsheet (AU)

A monthly fleet card statement from BP Plus, Caltex StarCard (Ampol AmpolCard), Shell Card, or WEX Motorpass is one document that feeds two outputs: a single AP bill posted into Xero or MYOB for the monthly direct debit, and a per-transaction spreadsheet that backs the Fuel Tax Credit claim at BAS label 7D. They come from the same statement, they are not substitutes for each other, and turning the PDF (or the portal export) into the fleet card statement to fuel tax credit spreadsheet the ATO will accept as a working paper is a distinct piece of work from posting the bill.

The FTC working paper needs three things the AP bill does not carry: per-vehicle rollups of litres, fuel-type split across diesel, ULP 91 / 95 / 98, LPG, and AdBlue / DEF, and — for any statement straddling 1 April 2026 — two claim rows per vehicle-use-category combination, one at the pre-change rate and one at the post-change rate. The starting point is the card portal's CSV export. PDF extraction from the monthly statement is the fallback when the export is summary-only, truncated, or date-range-restricted.

This article is written for AU trucking and logistics in-house bookkeepers, fleet managers and operations controllers, BAS agents with fleet-heavy clients, and construction and agriculture finance staff running utes and plant on fleet cards. What follows walks the per-transaction shape the working paper needs, per-vehicle allocation with a small worked fleet, the 1 April 2026 straddle-statement split, reconciliation to the bank and the GL, why the single AP bill and the FTC working paper coexist rather than compete, and the honest read on portal CSV versus PDF by brand. If you are on the fuel-invoice side of the FTC claim workflow rather than the fleet-card side, the sibling article there covers individual tax invoices — different document, same claim.

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What the FTC Working Paper Actually Needs

For every fuel stop on the statement, the working paper carries one row with these columns: card number (or last four digits), vehicle or driver identifier (rego where the card is vehicle-issued), transaction date, transaction time, site or location, litres, fuel type, per-litre price, amount including GST, and the GST component. Those are the fields that tie a claimed litre to a specific purchase at a specific place on a specific day, which is what an audit-ready record of a BAS label 7D claim has to do.

The total-litres and total-dollars figures most card portals expose at the top of the statement (and in their summary reports) do not replace this. A summary line cannot evidence that 1,240 of the month's 3,900 litres were diesel burnt in a heavy rigid on public roads, 620 were diesel burnt in an excavator on a building site, and the balance was ULP in a petrol depot runabout. The ATO expects the claim to be traceable back to the underlying transactions; without per-transaction rows, the per-vehicle allocation has nothing to stand on.

Fuel-type granularity has to survive the extraction because eligibility and rate depend on it. Fleet card statements typically span diesel, ULP 91, ULP 95, ULP 98, LPG, and AdBlue / DEF, and the claim treats each differently by vehicle class and use. The eligibility detail itself sits with the parent FTC article; here, what matters is that the working paper carries the fuel type on every line so the eligible litres can be totalled cleanly.

Most practitioners then add three supporting columns next to the raw transaction rows. Vehicle use category — on-road heavy, on-road light, off-road, or auxiliary / plant — maps each litre to the rate it is claimed at. Rate period — pre-1-April-2026 or post — handles the April 2026 straddle covered further down. An eligible-for-FTC flag (a simple yes / no) lets the spreadsheet exclude non-claimable stops (a private-use fuel stop charged by mistake, an AdBlue purchase that is not FTC-claimable for a given fleet, an out-of-period transaction) without deleting rows. The transaction-level sheet stays complete; the eligibility flag drives what rolls up. For the doctype extraction mechanics themselves — how to pull those columns out of a multi-hundred-page PDF cleanly — the generic fleet card statement to Excel walkthrough covers the extraction side in more depth; the portal-vs-PDF trade-off specific to AU fleet cards is covered further down.

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Per-Vehicle Allocation With a Worked Small Fleet

Fleet cards are billed at card level, but the FTC claim is settled at vehicle level. Each vehicle in the fleet has a use category — on-road heavy, on-road light, off-road, or auxiliary / plant — and the rate applied to its litres depends on that category. Until per-card litres are resolved to per-vehicle litres, there is nothing to claim against.

Take a three-vehicle fleet a small civil or logistics operator might run. One heavy rigid truck (diesel, on public roads, so on-road heavy). One Hilux ute (diesel, running between depots and sites, so on-road light). One excavator (diesel, used on a building site, so off-road plant). Each vehicle is issued its own fleet card; the monthly statement lists transactions per card with the card number, site, litres, fuel type, and amount. Because the card-to-vehicle map is one-to-one, the allocation is largely mechanical: every transaction on card 1234 is heavy-rigid litres, every transaction on card 5678 is Hilux litres, every transaction on card 9012 is excavator litres. From there, the month's litres roll up per vehicle by fuel type — say, 2,140 diesel litres against the heavy rigid, 840 diesel litres against the excavator, 520 diesel litres against the Hilux.

A few recurring patterns break that clean map and turn allocation into a manual step. A shared card used across two utes on the same site needs the bookkeeper to split litres between vehicles, usually from driver logs or odometer readings. A driver-issued card used across multiple vehicles in a roster week has the same problem in reverse. A replacement card issued mid-month — because the original was lost, damaged, or compromised — appears on the statement as a second card number against the same vehicle for the back half of the month; both card numbers roll up to the one vehicle. A one-off hire-vehicle fuel stop charged to a fleet card should be allocated to the hire vehicle's use category for that trip, not to the card's usual vehicle, and in many cases excluded from the FTC claim where the hire is not a business-use asset.

Where cards are issued per driver rather than per vehicle (common in trucking operations with a rotating driver pool), the mapping step moves from card-to-vehicle to transaction-to-vehicle. Every driver-card transaction has to be assigned to the specific vehicle it fuelled, usually from the trip log, the run sheet, or the telematics feed the bookkeeper reconciles the card transactions against. The same litres end up on the working paper either way; the mapping is just a column more of work.

The spreadsheet most practitioners settle on has two sheets. A transaction-level sheet holds every row as extracted from the statement, with the vehicle identifier, use category, rate period, and eligibility flag added as supporting columns. A per-vehicle summary sheet pivots from it: one row per vehicle per fuel type per rate period, with the total litres, total amount, and claim amount. It is the summary sheet that feeds the BAS label 7D calculation; the transaction sheet is what backs it up in an ATO review. Eligibility rules themselves — which vehicles qualify at which rate, how public-road travel and off-road use interact, what happens with mixed-use vehicles — are the parent FTC article's job. On this article, use category is the column the allocation hangs on: decide it per vehicle up-front, apply it to every row tied to that vehicle, and the claim builds itself.

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Splitting One Statement Across the 1 April 2026 Rate Change

A monthly fleet card statement whose billing period crosses 1 April 2026 — a cycle running 15 March to 14 April, for example, or 25 March to 24 April — carries transactions at two different FTC rates inside the same document. There is no way to handle that as a single claim row per vehicle for the month: the statement has to be partitioned on the rate-change boundary and the claim has to show two rows per vehicle-use-category combination.

According to QTA's summary of the April 2026 fuel tax credit rates, from 1 April 2026 through 30 June 2026, heavy vehicles travelling on public roads claim fuel tax credits at 20.6 cents per litre, with the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge component set to nil for the period. The post-change rate therefore applies to every eligible litre with a transaction date of 1 April 2026 or later in that straddle month; the pre-change rate applies to every eligible litre with a transaction date of 31 March 2026 or earlier.

Mechanically, the split is three steps on the working paper. Sort the extracted transaction rows by transaction date. Partition the rows on the 1 April 2026 boundary — pre-change rows above, post-change rows below. For each vehicle, build two claim rows on the per-vehicle summary sheet: pre-change litres at the pre-change rate for that vehicle's use category, and post-change litres at the post-change rate. The heavy rigid in the worked example from the last section might show 780 diesel litres at the pre-change on-road heavy rate for 15 to 31 March, then 1,360 diesel litres at the post-change on-road heavy rate of 20.6 cents per litre for 1 to 14 April. The excavator shows its off-road litres split the same way at the off-road rate. The Hilux, as on-road light, splits its ULP litres at the on-road light rate for each period.

A few practical checks are worth building into the split. The cut-off runs on transaction date, not billing period end: a fuel stop dated 31 March 2026 that does not post to the statement until the bank processes it on 2 April still sits in the pre-change bucket. Adjustments and rebills posted into the current statement for a prior-period transaction should carry the original transaction date, which fleet card portals usually preserve — but worth confirming on the first straddle statement you process, because a portal that re-dates rebills to the re-post date will shove pre-change litres into the post-change bucket incorrectly. A declined transaction that was later represented likewise keeps its original transaction date for the claim.

Downstream, on the BAS itself, the straddle month produces two line entries at label 7D for each vehicle-use-category combination rather than one. The working paper has to feed that shape directly, which is why the rate-period column introduced in the working paper layout earns its place — with pre-1-April-2026 or post populated on every transaction row, the per-vehicle summary sheet pivots to the two-row-per-vehicle-per-use-category shape the BAS needs without any additional manual work.

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Two Reconciliations: Statement to Bank, Per-Vehicle to GL

Two reconciliations close the loop around each monthly fleet card statement, and they run on different data shapes.

The first is statement-to-bank. The fleet card monthly total — net of credits, rebates, adjustments, and any rebills — should equal the direct debit that hits the business bank account on the billing cycle's settlement date. For most AU fleet card programs that is a single monthly debit; a handful run on a fortnightly or twice-monthly cycle. A mismatch between the statement total and the direct debit is almost always explained by a mid-month card replacement that briefly double-counted before the old card was closed off, a declined transaction that was later represented and posted into the next statement's credit line, or a volume rebate or loyalty credit that the card provider posted after the statement closed — but the same control-total check is also the layer at which skimming, card misuse, or outright card fraud first becomes visible, so an unexplained spread warrants a closer look at which card, which driver, which site before it gets written off as a timing difference.

The second reconciliation is working-paper-to-GL. With the AP bill posted at statement-level (covered in the next section), the per-vehicle allocation lives on the FTC working paper rather than on the general ledger. That makes the reconciliation a sum-check: total fuel expense on the GL for the statement month should equal the sum of the per-vehicle dollar amounts on the statement — and by extension, the sum of the extracted transaction amounts. Where the GL is split across more than one fuel expense account (heavy-vehicle fuel, light-vehicle fuel, plant fuel), the working paper has to support that split at the per-vehicle level, with each vehicle mapped to the account its litres post to. Per-vehicle litres times the applicable rate gives the claim amount at label 7D; per-vehicle dollars ties the claim back to the GL.

A few practical catches turn up every month. Out-of-period transactions — a fuel stop dated 30 March that does not appear until the statement issued 15 April — span the close and have to be decided cleanly: accrue in the March working paper, or include in the April one. Intercompany fleet cards, where one entity's cards are settled by another entity's bank account, need the inter-entity charge-through posted correctly so both the bill and the FTC claim sit on the right ledger. Driver cards that cross vehicle assignments mid-month (a driver switches from the rigid to the ute on the 15th) produce transactions that look like they belong to one vehicle in the top half of the month and another in the bottom half; the trip log is the source of truth.

Both the statement PDF and the derived working paper should be retained to the ATO's five-year standard for business records supporting a BAS claim, with the parent FTC article covering the recordkeeping detail in depth.

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One AP Bill, One FTC Working Paper — From the Same Statement

Importing a fleet card statement as a single AP bill into Xero or MYOB is the right call for the AP side of the ledger. The bill sits against the fleet card provider as the supplier, dated the statement period end, for the statement total including GST, with the GST component on the bill so the input tax credit lands on the BAS at G11 and 1B correctly. It is coded to the GL fuel expense account — or split across a fuel expense line and a non-fuel expense line if the card allows accessories, oil, AdBlue, or roadhouse purchases outside the fuel column. When the direct debit hits the bank feed a few days later, it reconciles straight against that one bill. That is the standard AU treatment and it is not wrong.

What it is not, by itself, is the FTC working paper. A single supplier bill for an aggregated monthly statement carries no per-transaction, per-vehicle, per-fuel-type, per-rate-period detail — and the FTC claim at label 7D needs all four. The working paper is a second output: an Excel or CSV workbook built from the extracted transaction rows, with the supporting columns described earlier, sitting either in a records folder for the relevant BAS period or attached to the AP bill inside the accounting system as a supporting document. Some practitioners also keep the source statement PDF attached to the bill so the PDF, the working paper, and the bill all travel together.

Attempting to import every statement line as a separate bill in Xero or MYOB defeats the one-debit, one-bill AP treatment: the direct debit stops reconciling in one step, the fuel expense account accumulates hundreds of micro-postings per month, and the AP subledger fills up with supplier transactions that were never invoiced individually. That pattern is not what AU BAS agents do, and there is no FTC benefit to it — label 7D is a separate calculation fed by the working paper, not by bill lines. For the mechanics of preparing the BAS in Xero around the fuel card bill and the FTC claim, and for importing the monthly direct debit into MYOB on the bank-feed side, the ecosystem articles cover each piece at tool level.

Cadence matters for how the two outputs sit against each other. The AP posting runs monthly, timed to the statement issue date. The FTC claim runs on the BAS cycle — quarterly for most SMB lodgers, monthly for businesses that report GST monthly or large PAYG-withholders — so a quarterly lodger pulls three statements into one claim, using the per-vehicle summary sheet for each month and aggregating the litres and claim amounts across the quarter. The AP bills are already posted; the working papers for each month are already built; the BAS just rolls them up.

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Portal CSV Versus PDF: When Each Is Enough

The test for whether the card portal's CSV export is enough is a single question: does it carry, per transaction, card or last-four, vehicle identifier or rego, date, site, litres, fuel type, per-litre price, amount inc GST, and the GST component? Where it does, the CSV is the working paper — add the use category, rate period, and eligibility flag columns, pivot to the per-vehicle summary, and the FTC step is done. The PDF extraction path is duplicated work, not extra rigour.

Portal exports fall short in a few recurring ways. Some reports are summary-only — annual and quarterly activity reports that give totals by card or by fuel type rather than transaction-by-transaction rows. Some portals restrict downloads to short date-range slices; Caltex StarCard's Online Service Centre exposes roughly thirteen months of history but downloads in thirty to thirty-five day windows, which is fine for a single monthly statement and awkward for a year-end compile where you need to stitch twelve or thirteen slices together and deduplicate any overlap. Some CSVs drop fields that are visible on the PDF: fuel type sometimes appears only on the PDF line rather than as its own CSV column, and the GST component is occasionally rolled into a total rather than broken out per transaction, which leaves the working paper short a column.

Per-brand shape is worth naming because every AU fleet card program has its own layout quirks. BP Plus statements carry the transaction-level detail cleanly and the online portal exposes flexible date ranges and CSV export. Caltex StarCard — now branded Ampol AmpolCard following the Ampol rebrand — runs through the Online Service Centre with the thirty to thirty-five day download slices noted above. Shell Card statements and the Shell Card portal also expose transaction-level CSV on flexible ranges. WEX Motorpass typically carries rego against each transaction, per-card litres, and GST-exclusive amounts at card level, so the GST component has to be derived from the inc-GST / ex-GST spread rather than read off a dedicated column. Whichever brand you are working from — a BP Plus statement being converted to an FTC spreadsheet, a Caltex StarCard statement being built into a fuel tax credit working paper, or a WEX Motorpass statement extraction — the working-paper columns are the same; the portal layouts differ at the margins. Motorcharge and Liberty Fuel Card serve the smaller end of the market and their portal shapes vary by account tier. The common shape across all of them is card-level transaction listings with site and product columns, and GST and litres separated — the differences sit at the margins.

When the export does not carry the full per-transaction detail the working paper needs, the monthly statement PDF is the authoritative source and extraction has to happen against it. The usual pattern is where generic PDF-to-Excel conversion starts to collapse: fleet card statements run twenty to several hundred pages, with the tabular layout breaking across page boundaries. Wrapped addresses smear one row across two. Merged header rows reappear on every page and have to be stripped without losing the first transaction that follows. Card sub-totals and month-to-date running totals interleave with transaction lines. Page breaks cut mid-transaction, producing half a row on page N and the other half on page N+1. Columns emerge mangled, fuel type drops into the litres column on a handful of pages, and the working paper is not audit-ready without manual cleanup. For multi-page statements where the portal export will not stand up, a purpose-built fleet card statement extraction tool handles the layout preservation that generic conversion loses — the user prompt names the columns (card or last-four, rego, date, site, litres, fuel type, per-litre price, amount inc GST, GST component; one row per transaction; skip summary and cover pages) and the same prompt holds across the statement regardless of length, with the output carrying a source-page reference for each row so any claim line can be traced back to the exact page of the PDF it came from. For the same pattern on weekly US statements from a different card program, the AtoB weekly statement extraction guide covers the doctype sibling — same shape of problem, different card, different market.

In practice the decision is simple enough to hold as a monthly habit: check the portal first, extract the PDF when the export will not cover card, rego, date, site, litres, fuel type, per-litre price, amount inc GST, and GST component per transaction. Keep the source statement PDF and the derived working paper together in the records folder for the period the claim covers, retained to the ATO's five-year standard; a year-end compile is a much lighter job when every month's pair of files is already where it belongs.