Crew Expenses and Mileage From a Phone: Receipts, Odometer Photos and Approval

Field expenses in a traffic control company tend to live in three places: the cupholder, the glove box, and the memory of whoever was driving. A crew buys fuel at 5 a.m., grabs ice and water for a hot afternoon on a flagging job, picks up sandbags because the yard ran short, pays a toll on the way to an out-of-town closure. At the end of the month someone in the office asks for receipts, and gets half of them.

The fix is not a stricter policy. It is recording the expense where and when it happens, with the phone the crew member already carries.

Why this is harder in traffic control

Crews rarely come to the office. Many go straight from home to the job, so there is no natural moment to hand in paper.

Purchases are small and constant. Fuel, ice, water, ballast, zip ties, batteries for barricade lights. No single receipt matters much, so none of them gets treated as important, and together they add up.

Some travel is long. Out-of-town work adds lodging, meals and mileage, which have their own rules. We covered the policy side in per diem and travel pay for traffic control crews.

Fuel is a real cost line. Fuel moves enough to affect bids, which is why some companies pass part of it through to customers. See fuel costs and surcharges for traffic control companies.

What a good expense record holds

The IRS describes what supporting documents for a business expense should show: they "should identify the payee, the amount paid, proof of payment, the date incurred, and include a description of the item purchased or service received" (IRS, What kind of records should I keep).

For a crew expense, that translates to:

• Who was paid. The store, the station, the hotel.
• How much. The total, with tax.
• Proof of payment. The receipt, and which card or cash was used.
• The date.
• What it was for. "Ice and water, flagging job on the county road" beats "supplies."
• The job, if it belongs to one. An expense that belongs to a job and is not tagged to it makes that job look more profitable than it was. That matters for job costing and for the next bid on similar work.

Record it the same day

Timing is not a nicety. IRS Publication 463 says you should record the elements of an expense "at or near the time of the expense," and that "a timely kept record has more value than a statement prepared later when there is generally a lack of accurate recall" (IRS Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses). The same publication notes that a log kept weekly, accounting for use during that week, is considered a timely kept record.

A photo taken in the truck before the crew member pulls away from the pump is the easiest timely record there is. It also solves the most common problem with paper receipts: thermal paper fades, and by the end of the month some receipts are blank.

Reimbursement arrangements and the reasonable-period rules

When a company pays employees back for business expenses, Publication 463 describes what an accountable plan requires. The expenses must have a business connection, the employee "must adequately account" to the employer "within a reasonable period of time," and the employee must return any excess reimbursement or allowance within a reasonable period of time.

The publication also lists actions that are treated as taking place within a reasonable period, regardless of circumstances: receiving an advance within 30 days of the expense, adequately accounting for expenses within 60 days after they were paid or incurred, and returning any excess within 120 days after the expense was paid or incurred.

Whether your reimbursement arrangement is an accountable plan, and how reimbursements are reported, is a question for your accountant. The practical lesson for operations is simpler: a weekly routine, where receipts come in and get approved the same week, moves far faster than the periods Publication 463 lists and keeps the records clean.

Mileage: odometer photos beat estimates

Mileage is the expense most often reconstructed from memory, and the one most likely to be wrong. There are two separate cases.

Company trucks. You are not reimbursing anyone, but the miles still matter. They drive maintenance intervals, fuel cost per mile, and how much of a truck's cost belongs to each job. An odometer photo at the start and end of a day, or of a trip, gives you a number nobody has to estimate.

Personal vehicles. When a crew member uses their own car for company business, you need the miles, the dates and the business purpose. An odometer photo at each end of the trip settles the first one.

If you reimburse personal-vehicle mileage at a per-mile rate, know where the rate comes from. The IRS publishes standard mileage rates. Its standard mileage rates page lists 76 cents a mile for business use for July 1 to December 31, 2026, and 72.5 cents a mile for January 1 to June 30, 2026. The rate changed in the middle of the year, so a reimbursement process that uses it has to apply the rate for the date the miles were driven, not the date the form was submitted. Whether you use the IRS rate, a lower company rate or actual costs is a decision for you and your accountant.

A simple approval routine

Approval keeps spending honest without making crews feel accused. A routine that works for most small companies:

1. The crew member submits. Photo, amount, date, what it was for, the job.
2. Someone else approves. The person who spent the money does not approve their own expense. In a small company, the office manager or owner.
3. Approve weekly, on a fixed day. An expense that sits unreviewed for a month is an expense nobody remembers.
4. Give a reason when you reject. "Personal item" or "receipt unreadable, please retake" tells the crew member what to fix.
5. Reimburse on a known schedule. Crews keep submitting when the money comes back reliably. Slow reimbursement teaches people to stop buying what the job needs, or to stop turning in receipts.

Watch for duplicate submissions of the same receipt, and for one card or one person whose spending changes suddenly. Neither is proof of anything, but both deserve a question.

How Traffic OS handles crew expenses

In Traffic OS expenses, a crew member takes a photo of a receipt or an odometer, and the photo is read automatically into an expense. Check what was read before submitting: a crumpled or faded receipt can still be misread, and the person holding it is the best one to catch that.

Expenses then move through approval, from pending to approved to reimbursed, so the office can see what is waiting and what has been paid back. The weekly expense report and the fleet mileage report show where the money and the miles went.

One honest limit: expense photos need a phone signal. In Traffic OS only clock punches are queued and sent later when there is no signal. If a crew works where coverage is poor, the photo can be taken at the next stop with signal, the same day.

Expenses also sit beside the rest of the business in the reports, including profit and loss, so field spending shows up where the owner already looks.