A fuel jobber makes a few cents a gallon. At that margin, the difference between a good year and a bad one is rarely one big mistake. It is a dozen small leaks running quietly all year long. Most are fixable once you can see them, and most stay hidden only because nobody catches them in time. Here is where the money actually goes, and what to watch for each one.
1. Pricing lag
Every hour your street and DTW prices sit still after the rack moves, margin walks out the door. On the way up, you are selling today's fuel at yesterday's price. On the way down, you may be carrying inventory that is now worth less than you paid, which is what price protection is meant to cover. Watch: how many hours pass, and how many sites you miss, between a rack change and your price actually updating. Plug it: one pricing routine that updates every site the same morning, tied to your real delivered cost rather than a number someone remembers.
2. Shrink you cannot explain
Shrink is the gallons that disappear between what you bought and what you sold. Some of it is normal: temperature changes the volume (the difference between gross and net gallons), and handling loses a little. The rest is a meter drifting out of calibration, a slow leak, or theft. Half a percent of shrink on a million gallons a year is 5,000 gallons gone, and at a few cents each that is real money. Watch: wet-stock reconciliation per tank, every delivery cycle. Plug it: reconcile book against stick or ATG often enough that a new leak shows up in days, not when you close the year.
3. Card fees eating a fixed margin
Card processing fees scale with the dollar price of the fuel. Your margin does not. It is fixed cents per gallon. So when fuel is $4 a gallon, the card fee on a fill-up can be larger than the entire margin you made on those gallons. Watch: card fees measured as cents per gallon, not just as a percentage on a statement. Plug it: a cash discount, pricing that accounts for the fee, and steering volume toward lower-cost tender where you can.
4. Freight and fees that never reach the invoice
Every load carries freight, and many carry environmental and regulatory fees. If those do not land on the customer's invoice, you absorb them. One dropped freight line per load does not feel like much. Multiply it by every delivery for a year and it is a number you would not ignore if you saw it in one place. Watch: freight and fee recovery per load, customer by customer. Plug it: build the pass-throughs into the invoice automatically so none of them get forgotten.
5. Invoice and billing slips
This is the least glamorous leak and one of the largest. A customer billed at the wrong price tier. A missing fuel-tax line. A gallon count off by a digit. A contract customer still billed at last month's terms. Each one is small and easy to miss. Across thousands of invoices a year they add up to a number that surprises people. Watch: any invoice that does not match the actual load and the customer's real contract. Plug it: generate invoices straight from the delivery and the customer's current terms instead of keying them by hand.
6. Slow-pay accounts and credit risk
Money you have earned but not collected is margin you are financing for someone else, and a slice of it never comes back. A balance that quietly creeps from net 10 to net 40 is costing you, and the account that stops paying entirely costs you the fuel and the margin both. Watch: AR aging and who is drifting past terms. Plug it: see the aging early enough to tighten or hold terms before a small balance turns into a write-off.
The common thread
None of these is dramatic on its own. Each is a small percentage. But on a few-cent margin they compound, and the reason they survive year after year is almost always the same: nobody could see them while there was still time to act. The fix is rarely a clever trick. It is accurate numbers, soon enough to do something about. FastDragon ties your purchases, inventory, deliveries, and invoices together so each of these drains shows up early, while it is still a small fix instead of a year-end surprise.
Common questions
What is a normal amount of fuel shrink?
A small loss is expected from temperature swings and handling, often a fraction of a percent. The number that matters is your own baseline and whether it moves. A steady 0.2% is mostly physics. A jump to 1% is a leak, a theft, or a bad meter. You only catch the change if you reconcile every delivery cycle instead of waiting for year-end.
We are a small shop. Is this worth the effort?
The smaller you are, the more each leak matters, because you have less volume to absorb it. A two-truck jobber feels one billing error or one slow-pay account harder than an operation with twenty trucks. The leaks scale down with you, and so does the margin, so the percentage that drains away hurts just as much.
Which leak should we look at first?
Start with the one you cannot currently see. For most shops that is shrink or billing, because both hide in plain sight and both become measurable the moment you reconcile load-to-invoice and book-to-tank. Fix what you can measure first, then move to the next.