How-to guides
How to build your IFTA worksheet
Who this is for: owners and office staff who file the quarterly fuel tax return.
Fuel tax (IFTA) takes your miles by state and your gallons by state and works them through to net taxable gallons for each jurisdiction — the numbers that go on the return. It stops there, on purpose.
This is a worksheet, not a return
The app does not apply tax rates and does not tell you what you owe in dollars. Rates change every quarter across all 58 IFTA jurisdictions, and this app does not hold them. Being 95% right on a signed compliance document is worse than not offering the figure at all.
What you get is the hard part: the miles, the gallons, the fleet MPG, and the taxable and credit gallons per state. Hand that to whoever files your return — your base jurisdiction's online filing, your accountant, or your permit service — and they apply the current rates.
What IFTA needs from you
Two things per quarter, and the app cannot invent either of them:
| Where it comes from | |
|---|---|
| Miles run in each state, per truck | Your ELD, or typed in |
| Gallons bought in each state, per truck | Entered as fuel purchases |
Note what is not on that list: your loads. A load knows where it started and where it finished, and a Florida-to-Tennessee run crosses Georgia. Working mileage out from loads would report Georgia as zero, which is exactly the understatement an audit finds. So the app never guesses — miles come from your ELD or from a person, and every row records which.
The same goes for fuel. A $412 fuel expense on a load is right for costing that load and useless for a fuel-tax return, which needs gallons and the state. That is why fuel purchases are entered separately from load expenses.
1. Record your fuel purchases
Fuel tax (IFTA) → Fuel purchases → Add purchase. Per purchase: the truck, the date, the state, the gallons, and optionally the cost and where you bought it.
One checkbox matters more than the rest:
Fuel tax paid at the pump — leave this ticked for a truck stop. Untick it for bulk fuel out of your own tank.
Bulk fuel is not a credit against the state. Claiming it as one overstates your
credit and produces a bill months later, so the worksheet counts those gallons
towards your fleet MPG and keeps them out of the credit column. They show on
the worksheet as +n bulk.
Attach the receipt to the purchase if you have it. The arithmetic works without it; an audit asks for it.
2. Get your state mileage in
Fuel tax (IFTA) → State mileage. Two ways:
From your ELD. Press Get from ELD. This shows you what it would write and writes nothing. Check it, then press Import. Two steps rather than one because these figures end up on a signed return, so a person looks first.
Only Samsara supports this today. If your ELD is Motive, the button tells you so and your mileage goes in by hand — everything else on this page works the same either way.
The preview tells you three things worth reading:
- Rows it could not match to a truck. Matching is on the unit number, so "Unit 12" and "unit12" are the same truck — but a truck named something else entirely in your ELD is reported here rather than guessed at. Rename the truck's unit number to match your ELD and pull again, or those miles are left out.
- Figures you entered by hand that would be replaced. It asks before overwriting them.
- Miles outside IFTA. Alaska, Hawaii, the Canadian territories and anything in Mexico are not IFTA jurisdictions. Those miles do not go on the return and are not counted towards your fleet MPG, so they are left out and named.
By hand. Press Enter by hand and record the truck, state and miles. Entering the same truck and state again corrects that figure rather than adding to it. Manual mileage is perfectly filable — the worksheet just notes it, and an auditor will ask what it came from, so keep the trip sheets.
3. Read the worksheet
Pick a quarter at the top. The four figures across the top are the whole return in summary:
- Total miles and Total gallons — everything, all jurisdictions.
- Fleet MPG — total miles ÷ total gallons. One number for the whole fleet. Every jurisdiction below divides by this, not by the truck that ran the miles. That is how IFTA specifies it.
- Due — the filing deadline, the last day of the month after the quarter ends.
Then By jurisdiction, one row per state:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Miles | What you ran in that state |
| Taxable gallons | Those miles ÷ fleet MPG — the fuel you burned there |
| Tax-paid gallons | Gallons you bought there with tax paid at the pump |
| Net gallons | Taxable − tax-paid. Positive is owed, negative is a credit |
A negative line is normal, not an error: a truck that fuels in a cheap state it barely drives through produces exactly that.
By truck is a sanity check only. Per-truck MPG is shown so you can spot the truck that is dragging the fleet figure — the return itself divides everything by the fleet number.
4. Download it
Download worksheet gives you a CSV with the same figures, the per-truck breakdown, every warning, and the note about this not being a return. Column names match the language on the return, so whoever files it can map them without asking you.
What the warnings mean
Problems are listed above the numbers rather than below them, because a worksheet that looks finished and is not is the only way this feature can actually cost you money. Anything under Not ready to file has to be fixed before the figures mean anything.
Must fix
| Warning | What happened | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| No jurisdiction mileage | Nothing recorded for the quarter | Import from your ELD, or enter it per state |
| No fuel purchases | No gallons recorded, so there is no fleet MPG | Enter the quarter's fuel |
| Fuel was bought for a truck with no mileage | Its gallons count and its miles do not, which understates every state it ran | Add that truck's mileage |
| Fuel but no miles in a state | You cannot buy fuel in a state without driving in it | That state's mileage is missing |
| Implausible fleet MPG | The fleet average is outside 3–12 MPG | Usually mileage for some trucks and fuel for all of them, or gallons entered as litres. Fix this first — every line divides by it |
| Not an IFTA jurisdiction | A row is against a state that is not in IFTA | Remove it. While it counts, your fleet MPG is too high and every state below owes more than shown |
Worth a look
| Warning | What it means |
|---|---|
| Miles but no fuel in a state | Normal for a state you only drove through, and it means you owe those gallons. Worth confirming no receipt was missed |
| Mileage entered by hand | Filable, but keep the trip sheets |
| Fuel purchases with no receipt | The figures still work; an audit asks for the receipts |
Who can do what
| Action | Owner | Admin | Dispatcher | Driver | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| See the worksheet, the fuel list and the mileage list | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Add or edit a fuel purchase; set mileage; import from the ELD | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — |
| Delete a fuel purchase or a mileage row | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — |
This page is not available through the partner API at all. A fuel-tax return is signed by the carrier, and the figures behind it should not be writable by a vendor's API key.
Related
- Connect your other tools — connecting the ELD that supplies your state mileage
- Work out whether a load pays — where the fuel figures also help
- Read the dashboard, daily report, and scorecards
Still stuck?
Email support@dynamanic.io with your company name, what you did, what happened — quoting any message on screen — and when, with your timezone.