Fuel resale software is what you run when you buy fuel to sell again. The word that matters is resale, because the same gallon can leave your inventory three different ways, at three different margins, on three different pieces of paper, and a lot of systems only handle one of them well. Below is one diesel gallon costed to four decimals and walked out all three doors. We build one of these systems, called FastDragon, and I have said where it is weak as well as where it is strong.
What a resale gallon costs before you sell it
Take a clear ULSD drop on a Tuesday morning. The terminal posted $2.4400. You hauled it ninety miles. Federal excise on diesel attaches when the product is removed from the rack, and the state you file in adds its own. Nothing has been sold yet and the gallon already carries four numbers.
| Line | Per gallon | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Rack price, ULSD clear | $2.4400 | What the terminal posted that morning |
| Freight, 90 miles | $0.0420 | Your truck or a common carrier |
| Federal excise | $0.2440 | Attaches at the rack on removal |
| State excise | $0.2600 | The rate in the state this example files in |
| Landed cost per gallon | $2.9860 | What the gallon costs you sitting on the truck |
$2.9860 is the number every decision after this gets measured against. If your system carries a rounded cost, or carries the rack price and figures freight and tax somewhere else, you are pricing against a number that is close instead of right. On 8,000 gallons, a tenth of a cent is $8. On thirty million gallons a year, a tenth of a cent is $30,000. The full build-up is in what makes up the price of fuel.
The same gallon, three ways out the door
Now sell it. A thousand gallons of that drop goes to a dealer at a tank wagon price of $3.0860. A thousand goes to a station you supply that is run by a commissioned agent. A thousand goes through a store you own outright. Retail on the street is $3.3990 at both of those, card fees run 2.4 percent of the pump price, and the agent earns four cents a gallon.
| Channel | Off the top | Margin/gal | On 1,000 gal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dealer, at DTW | Nothing | $0.1000 | $100 |
| Commissioned agent | $0.1216 | $0.2914 | $291 |
| Your own store | $0.0816 | $0.3314 | $331 |
Off the top is the card fee, 8.16 cents at that pump price, plus the agent's four cents where it applies. The dealer pays his own card fees, so nothing comes off yours.
Ten cents, twenty-nine cents, thirty-three cents. Same gallon, same truck, same morning. The dealer gallon is clean money with no site cost behind it. The agent gallon and the store gallon carry rent, maintenance, taxes on the dirt, the canopy lights and somebody's payroll, which is why an owner who only looks at margin per gallon can talk himself into the wrong channel. The job of resale software is to show all three honestly, in one place, with the site costs sitting underneath them.
Most systems handle the first row. Fewer handle the second. The ones that handle the third usually do it in a separate store product with its own login and its own set of books, and somebody spends the last week of every month making the two agree.
The seven things resale software has to do
- Carry landed cost to four decimals. Rack, freight, excise and any fees in one cost per gallon per grade per load, used by every price formula downstream. See rack pricing explained.
- Split one load across several customers. A transport with three compartments going to three accounts is a normal Tuesday. One entry, three invoices, cost allocated by grade. See tank truck compartments explained.
- Match the purchase to the resale. Which gallons you bought went to which customer, so margin is a fact rather than a monthly average.
- Check the supplier before you pay him. Line by line against the gallons that came off the rack, at the contract price, with each tax where the schedule puts it. See how to read a fuel invoice.
- Hold exemption and resale certificates on the customer. With expiry dates, and a stop on a taxed invoice going to an exempt account. See fuel tax exemptions.
- Handle own-use withdrawals. When you pull resale fuel for your own trucks, the gallon comes out of inventory at cost, lands in fuel expense on the right entity, and shows up on the right line of the return.
- Post everything to one ledger. Dealer invoice, agent settlement, store day, supplier payment, all as balanced journal entries by entity, so the month closes from one set of numbers. See multi-entity accounting for petroleum.
The withdrawal nobody sets up
I have walked into offices where the company fuels its own bobtails out of the bulk plant and nobody has ever made an entry for it. The gallons leave the tank, the physical inventory comes up short at year end, and the shrink gets written off as loss. The truck fuel was real expense the whole time and the books called it evaporation.
Ask every vendor to show you a withdrawal for own use on their screen. Watch where the cost lands and watch what it does to the return. It is a five-minute test and it tells you more about how seriously a system takes resale than an hour of the sales deck. The rest of the shrink question is in what is fuel shrinkage and wet stock reconciliation.
The vendors worth a call in 2026
Six established systems and ours sell into this work in the United States. Each was built around a different center of gravity, and that center is what decides whether it fits.
- PDI Enterprise Wholesale. The large multi-state marketer with accounting staff and IT people. More than 250 marketers run it. Motor fuel tax through an Avalara partnership.
- ADD Energy E3. New Jersey, family owned since 1973. Built where a delivery fleet and several product lines are the business. The books sit on Microsoft Dynamics.
- COMPAS Commander. From AIMS, a financial software house first and a fuel one second. Inventory down to the tank, excise reporting, single-entry posting. Picked up Petro-Data in April 2026.
- RR Fuel. Red River Software, Post Falls, Idaho, 1,200 customers. Built around co-ops, propane and consumer route delivery, with a DTN price import and EDI tax files on the wholesale side.
- iRely Petroleum. A single ERP covering fuel, lubricants, propane, stores and agriculture, sized for the large end of the market.
- Series2K. Store back office first, one site up to more than a thousand. I spent over a decade there and still send store-led operators that way.
- FastDragon. Ours. Below.
Head to head on features and pricing, see PDI vs DTN vs Red River vs ADD vs AIMS vs FastDragon.
Where FastDragon fits
FastDragon was built for the operator who sells the same gallon all three ways. Landed cost is carried to four decimals from the moment the load is received, and every dealer formula prices off that number rather than a rounded one. Allocation ties each purchase to the customer who took it, grade by grade, so the ten-cent dealer gallon and the thirty-three-cent store gallon are facts about a load instead of a monthly average. Own-use withdrawals have their own entry, so fuel burned in your own trucks leaves inventory at cost and lands in expense on the right entity. Agent settlements, dealer invoices and store days all post as balanced journal entries, so one P&L carries all three channels with the site costs sitting underneath.
Where it does not fit: gallons that go down a residential route. Degree days, K-factors, prepaid heating contracts and propane tank rental belong to Red River and ADD Systems, and I would rather say so on the first call than the fourth. See the screens on the Fuel Jobber page and the package bands on pricing.
Take this to the demo
Pull one real load out of your current system. Split across three customers, with freight and the tax lines on it. Pull the supplier invoice that came behind it. Take the same paperwork to every vendor, make each one key it in front of you, and write down the landed cost their system lands on. If two vendors give you two different numbers for the same load, one of them is rounding something you are pricing against. The rest of the checklist is in how to choose fuel jobber software.
Questions people ask
What is fuel resale software?
The system a company runs when it buys fuel to sell again rather than to burn. It carries the rack cost into every customer price, turns each bill of lading into invoices, keeps the excise tax straight from the rack through to the return, settles the supplier invoice against what was actually lifted, bills the dealers and the agents, and posts all of it to the books. Software for a fleet that burns the fuel it buys is a different product entirely.
Does the software have to handle resale exemption certificates?
Yes, if you sell in a state that applies sales tax to fuel or if you sell merchandise to other resellers. The system should hold the certificate against the customer record, show its expiry, and stop a taxed invoice going out to an exempt account. Excise exemptions for farm, government, school and off-road use work differently and are covered in fuel tax exemptions.
What happens when I pull resale fuel for my own trucks?
That gallon stops being inventory and becomes an expense, and in most states it becomes a taxable use with tax owed at the rate for its use. A system that handles resale properly gives you a withdrawal entry that takes the gallon out of inventory at cost, puts it in fuel expense on the right entity, and puts it on the correct line of the return. Jobbers who do this on a sticky note are the ones who get a surprise on the audit.
Which fuel resale software is best for a small jobber?
For a company reselling a few million gallons a year across dealers, agents and a store or two, the systems sized to you are FastDragon, COMPAS Commander from AIMS, and RR Fuel, with ADD Energy E3 if you also run a consumer delivery route. PDI Enterprise and iRely are built for much larger operations. Take the same load and the same month-end to each demo and grade them on the same sheet.
Can QuickBooks do this?
QuickBooks can hold the books at the end of it. What it will not do is carry a rack price into a dealer formula, split one load across three customers, figure tax per gallon per state, or reconcile the supplier invoice. Operators who try it end up with a spreadsheet doing the fuel and QuickBooks doing the money, and the two disagree by month-end. FastDragon posts to QuickBooks for owners who want to keep their accountant where they are.
Send us one load and we will cost it live →
Sources
Federal excise rates on diesel and gasoline from IRS Publication 510. Rack, freight, retail and card-fee figures in the worked example are representative of a small southeastern jobber in 2026 and are there to show the shape of the arithmetic. Vendor facts read September 11, 2026 on each company's own site: PDI, ADD Systems, AIMS, Red River, iRely, Series2K. The AIMS purchase of Petro-Data was announced April 1, 2026.