Fuel is the number everyone quotes — and it's misleading
Ask a driver what their car costs per kilometer and most will divide fuel spend by distance. That's easy, but it hides the expensive half: oil changes, tyres, brakes, insurance-adjacent repairs, and the surprise garage bill. Those don't vanish because you left them out of the maths.
A petrol car might burn 8 cents of fuel per km, but once you add a year of maintenance the honest figure can be 30 40% higher. If you're comparing two cars, deciding whether to sell, or budgeting a road trip, the fuel-only number leads you astray.
What to actually track
To get a real cost-per-kilometer you need two streams for each vehicle:
- Distance — odometer/mileage readings so FinMan knows how far you've driven.
- All spend — refuels (litres, price, total, station) plus repairs, maintenance and other car costs.
FinMan keeps these per vehicle, so if you run more than one car each gets its own honest figure. Cost-per-km is then total car spend divided by kilometers driven — fuel and everything else combined.
Make logging painless
The reason people skip maintenance costs is friction. Two habits fix that:
- Snap the fuel receipt. Send a photo to the Telegram or WhatsApp bot and AI fills in litres, price, total and station. Photograph the dashboard too and the odometer reading comes with it.
- Log the garage bill the day it happens. Add it as a car cost against the same vehicle. A €120 oil change entered once quietly raises your true per-km number where it belongs.
Keep odometer readings current. Cost-per-km is only as accurate as the distance behind it — a stale reading inflates every kilometer.
Why the fuller number pays off
Once repairs and maintenance are in the mix, you can see things fuel alone hides:
- Whether an older car is quietly getting expensive as repairs climb.
- How a petrol car really compares to an EV once servicing is counted.
- What a 400 km trip will actually cost, not just the fuel guess.
Start simple: log every refuel with a photo, add each maintenance bill as it lands, and keep the odometer fresh. Give it a couple of months and FinMan's cost-per-kilometer stops being a fuel estimate and becomes a number you can plan around.