How to Generate Accurate Bulk Fuel Invoices
But bank loan applications are a long, arduous, complex process, especially for business owners who don’t speak English as their first language. Businesses can become discouraged by the huge amount of documentation and scrutiny of credit required to obtain a bank loan. With a quick application and quote, a business can have cash in its hand within just a few days. Ideally, a cash advance is totally transparent, with no hidden fees. Cash advance companies don’t consider poor credit to be a deal-breaker and tend to offer more flexible repayment programs.
Use commercial software or services instead of in-house or manual solutions. Today’s fuel excise tax software has matured and now provides considerable flexibility. Commercial software provides lower cost of ownership and improves invoice accuracy, since processes and software are tested across a broad range of customers and use cases.
Scope of the Industry
While mystery shoppers are convenient, they still don’t fully grasp your business — a problem that the most detailed set of instructions won’t solve. Your actual staff members are more likely to see other issues that may not be part of a shopper experience audit. Additionally, you may want to have separate employee-conducted audits for safety, cash handling and more specific inventory data, such as tank amounts. A flexible platform will allow you to create multiple surveys for different purposes, which will save your company time and effort.
- And of course, offering a nice clean restroom is a plus for drawing customers out of their cars and into the store.
- As global demand for fuel continues to rise, fuel prices are expected to remain volatile and high.
- These three trends will put some core convenience categories—tobacco, sugary drinks, salty snacks, magazines, and phone cards—under structural pressure.
- Royal Dutch Shell announced that basket sizes in its stores had increased by 15 percent year to date in September 2020, for instance.1Third-quarter 2020 results, Royal Dutch Shell, October 29, 2020, shell.com.
- To be fair many of their convictions or analytics may indeed be correct.
- Instead of a GasBuddy member driving back to their computer to type in the prices they observed, they do it from the parking lot instead.
Chances are these 5 systems will never give you accurate picture of your finances. Choosing the right Bay Area accounting firm for your business or individual financial needs is an important decision. You need a firm with a knowledgeable staff, wide-ranging experience, a commitment to integrity, and a full complement of services. This year alone, companies from a variety of different industries have had to lower their earnings expectations due to exorbitant fuel costs. For example, Waste Management Inc., which has the fifth largest private fleet in the country, missed its earnings estimate earlier this year in part due to fuel costs. There are, however, retrofit EMV technology solutions through which compliance is painless and affordable.
Focus on Automation, Centralization, Accuracy, and Speed
For example, one person may be responsible for researching and tracking fuel excise tax regulations across all jurisdictions. Specific owners should be assigned for BOLs, contracts, price indexes, surcharge rates, and business partner tax certificates. Too often, data collection is handled as a one-time project, with no one assigned to ensure timely data updates after the invoice generation process is in place. The complexity of fuel contracts, price volatility, and tax law changes make it harder than ever to generate accurate invoices.
Choose a solution that also leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze sales, market, and pricing patterns. Machine learning can support your pricing strategies by interpreting cumulative data for forecasting. Today prices are changing as often as two and three times each day with price swings as high as twenty cents.
ATCO Inc., Owner of Rogers Market, Selects Fuel Price Management Software to Maintain Ambitious Growth Plans
The companies that allow pricing decisions to be made by the store managers result in every store location being priced differently. For instance, one store manager may be very analytical and have a printed report every morning from PDI with the past 7 days gallon sales compared to the same 7 days last year. Volume, Volume, Volume is keenly important to the overall success at this store. He believes that he must be one penny below the lowest competitor or he will sacrifice his gallons. Delivery Diversions – Often errors occur when the actual fuel delivery doesn’t go according to plan. This will cause the invoice, based on the original plan, to be in error.
Additional Data SourcesOPIS Radius Report Numerous retailers are turning to the OPIS Radius report for near real-time data feeds of the changing prices of their competitors. This is a subscription-based service and is priced based on the distance from your store, e.g. two-mile, five-mile, and ten-mile radius. This broad sweeping report enables you to choose which competitors gas station accounting within those geographic boundaries you want to watch more closely. Many companies find this to be a very helpful supplemental resource to augment their store manager reported surveys. Increased Tax Risk – Long after the invoice has been paid, a buyer or tax auditor can find a problem, so undetected errors present a significant financial risk for a fuel supplier.
