Recurring costs: fuel, leases, parking and tolls

What the Costs tab shows

Every vehicle in your fleet carries costs that show up on a schedule, not on a repair invoice: fuel, a lease or loan payment, a parking permit, tolls. None of that lives on a single work order, so it is easy to lose track of what the fleet actually costs you to run each month. The Costs tab is where Verinode keeps that spend in one place, whether it belongs to one truck or to the whole fleet, and rolls it up into a single monthly number.

Verinode does not pull these figures from a bank feed on its own. Recurring costs appear here as they flow in from forwarded statements and ingested documents, or as you add them directly. You decide what to log and when; Verinode's job is to keep the total straight and put it next to the rest of your fleet data.

Where to find it

Open Fleet from the sidebar at /fleet. The Fleet page is a horizontal row of cards you scroll or click between: Roster, Maintenance, Compliance, Insurance, Drivers, Accidents, Costs. Costs is the last card, tinted green to match the "money going out" tone used across the row.

What you see

The cost list

Each row in the Costs tab is one recurring cost line. Reading left to right:

• Cost type pill. A rounded label reading Fuel, Vehicle Lease, Vehicle Loan, Parking, Tolls, or Other. This is the cost_type you picked when the line was added, humanized into plain words rather than the raw database value.
• Scope. Either the vehicle's name (for a cost tied to one truck or van) or Fleet-wide (for a cost that is not tied to any single vehicle, like a shared fuel card or a garage's monthly parking permit that covers several vehicles at once).
• Notes, if any were entered when the cost was added, shown in a smaller line under the scope.
• Monthly amount, right-aligned, always expressed as a per-month dollar figure regardless of how it was originally entered (more on that below). Under the amount, if a start date was recorded, a small "since [date]" line shows when the cost began.

Rows scoped to a vehicle are clickable: clicking one opens that vehicle's profile, the same drill-in used from the Roster tab. Fleet-wide rows are not clickable, since there is no single vehicle profile to open.

The header line and the fleet-wide total

Above the list, a line reads the count of recurring costs on file, for example "6 costs across the fleet." To the right of that, in bold green, sits the fleet-wide monthly total: the sum of every recurring cost's monthly amount, vehicle-scoped and fleet-wide combined, expressed as a single "$X/mo" figure. This is the number to watch if you want a fast read on what the fleet is costing you every month outside of one-off maintenance and repairs. It moves the moment you add, edit, or remove a cost line.

Dollar figures use the same compact formatting as the rest of Fleet: amounts under $1,000 show as a plain dollar figure, amounts in the thousands round to one decimal with a "k" suffix (for example $2.4k), and amounts at a million or more round to "M." A missing or zero amount shows as a dash.

Vehicle-scoped vs. fleet-wide costs

Every recurring cost is either tied to one vehicle or shared across the fleet, and that choice matters because it changes how the cost reads on the vehicle's own profile as well as here.

• Vehicle-scoped costs are the ones you can attribute cleanly: a specific truck's lease payment, a loan on one van, a fuel card issued to one driver. These show the vehicle's name in the row and roll into that vehicle's own cost picture, not just the fleet total.
• Fleet-wide costs are the ones that do not belong to a single vehicle: a shared fuel account that several trucks draw against, a monthly parking permit for the whole lot, a toll transponder account billed once and used across multiple vehicles. These show Fleet-wide in place of a vehicle name and count only toward the fleet total, not any one vehicle.

Getting this right at entry time is what keeps the fleet-wide total meaningful. If you attribute a shared fuel card to a single truck, that truck's cost picture overstates its real running cost while the others understate theirs. When in doubt, log it fleet-wide.

The Add Cost modal

Clicking + Add Cost, available from the Costs tab header (and pre-filled with a vehicle when you open it from that vehicle's own profile), opens the Add Recurring Cost modal. It asks for:

1. 1Vehicle. A dropdown of your active vehicles, plus a Fleet-wide (shared cost) option at the top. Leaving it on Fleet-wide records the cost with no vehicle attached, exactly the fleet-wide scope described above. Only vehicles with a status of active appear in the list.
2. 2Cost type. Choose Fuel, Vehicle Lease, Vehicle Loan, Parking, Tolls, or Other.
3. 3Amount (USD). A plain dollar figure. It is required and must be zero or positive; a negative or non-numeric entry is rejected before the cost saves.
4. 4Cadence. Per month or Per year. Picking Parking or Tolls as the cost type automatically switches the cadence to Per year, since those are the two costs operators most often pay in a single annual charge (a yearly parking permit, an annual toll-transponder renewal) rather than monthly. You can override the cadence manually for any cost type.
5. 5Start date and End date, both optional. If you set both, the end date must fall on or after the start date.
6. 6Notes, optional, for the vendor, account, or route detail that makes the line recognizable later.

When you enter an annual amount, Verinode divides it by 12 on save so the fleet-wide monthly total stays an apples-to-apples "per month" figure across every cost type. The modal tells you this directly: "We'll divide by 12 on save so the monthly roll-up reads naturally." The original annual figure is not lost, it is appended to the row's notes (for example, "Annual amount $1,200 ÷ 12 → monthly cents.") so the audit trail still shows what you actually entered and paid.

Saving calls Add Cost, which writes the row, refreshes the Fleet page so the new line and updated total appear immediately, and closes the modal. If the save fails, for example because the picked vehicle can no longer be verified as one of your own, the modal stays open and shows the error instead of silently discarding what you typed.

Empty state

Before any recurring cost has been added, the Costs tab reads:

"No recurring costs tracked yet. Add fuel, lease, loan, parking, or toll spend here."

next to the + Add Cost button. There is no fleet-wide total shown until at least one cost exists, since a total of zero costs is not a useful number.

How this fits with the rest of Fleet

The Costs tab is one of seven cards on the Fleet page. Roster is where vehicles themselves live; Maintenance logs one-off service and repair spend rather than the recurring lines tracked here; Compliance and Insurance cover renewals and coverage; Drivers and Accidents round out the picture. Recurring costs are deliberately kept separate from Maintenance because a lease payment or a fuel bill recurs on its own schedule and does not represent work done to the vehicle, it represents the ongoing cost of having the vehicle on the road at all.

The fleet-wide monthly total from this tab is one input into your broader cost structure. For how fleet spend fits into what you keep at the bottom line, see Understanding your margin. To see how the fleet's own vehicle roster and vehicle profile pages work, look at the sibling articles in this section.

Data sources