Automated Fuel Surcharge 

With the increased fuel costs this past year, keeping up with what you need to bill for the fuel surcharge is essential to ensure you aren’t losing money on each load. This is especially important for quotes more than a few months old. To help, we added functionality to automatically calculate a fuel surcharge, add it to the invoices, and include it in the revenue numbers. Doing this process manually is time-consuming and error-prone.

You will need to enable the fuel surcharge functionality, define your calculation(s), and specify which calculation, if any, to use on the various quotes and orders. 

Enabling and Configuring Fuel Surcharge 

To enable the fuels surcharge functionality, browse to Administration|Settings and click on the “Fuel” tab. Clicking the “Show Fuel Surcharge” checkbox will display more controls that will allow you to configure how you want the fuel surcharge to behave. 

On invoices, you have the option to display one fuel surcharge line directly beneath the corresponding line or to have a single fuel surcharge item under all other items on the invoice. Choose the option that you prefer. The single line item is probably the least confusing. 

Next, you’ll need to specify the “Item to use for the fuel surcharge on invoice.” If you haven’t yet defined this item in your item list, you can click the plus button to the right of the dropdown and add the appropriate item. 

Next, you’ll configure the fuel surcharge calculation(s). You may have multiple calculations that can be used on different quotes or orders. Following are the parts of the calculation. 

• Default – check this if you want this to be the calculation that is defaulted on new quotes and orders. 

• Name – give it a meaningful name so you’ll be able to differentiate between calculations if you have multiple calculations. 
• Base Fuel Cost – this is the fuel cost you based your pricing on.  
• Can change – if this checkbox is checked, you’ll be able to change the base fuel cost on quotes and orders using this calculation. This is useful if you want to use the same percentage increase per increment but have been adjusting prices so that you need to use a different base fuel cost on different orders/quotes. This keeps you from having to create a new calculation to account for changing base fuel costs. 
• Increment – this is the change increment in change in fuel cost that you want to apply the percent to. This is typically in dollar. e.g.) .10 would be 10 cents. 
• Freight Rate % - this is how much you want to increase the freight rate by per increment change. 
• Credit – checking this box will result in a credit being applied to the invoice when the current fuel cost falls below the base fuel cost. 

Quotes 

When creating a quote, you’ll see a “Fuel surcharge calculation” dropdown beneath the list of quote items as shown below. You probably have not configured the fuel surcharge properly if you don't see the fuel surcharge option on your quotes and orders. On new quotes, the fuel surcharge will default to the default fuel calculation, and you can change it if you want a different calculation to be used. 

If the settings allow the base fuel cost to be changed, you’ll see a control allowing you to edit the base fuel cost. Edit that as needed. 

Orders 

When an order is created from a quote, the fuel surcharge calculation used on the quote is copied to the order. In this case, you will be unable to edit the calculation nor the base fuel cost as shown below. 

On the other hand, when an order is created without a quote, the fuel surcharge behaves much like the quote in that you can change it and change the base fuel cost if applicable as shown below. 

Dashboard Components 

If you have fuel surcharge being calculated, it will display on the revenue graphs. Hovering over the segment will show you the value. The fuel surcharge will be included in the revenue values used on all the dashboard components that deal with revenue. 

Tickets by Driver 

On the “Tickets by Driver” screen, you can specify the current fuel cost. We default the value from the previous day, but you can edit the value if the fuel prices have changed. Typically, companies are using the fuel cost from the “US Energy Information and Administration’s” site at https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/ 

You’ll choose the appropriate date and region to get your current fuel cost and edit the value in the “Current Fuel Cost” control. When you change this value, all the tickets for this date are updated to reflect the changed fuel cost. 

Note that you can also get historical information from https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/ if you need to look back in time to determine a base fuel cost from when a quote was created. 

Invoice 

When you configured the fuel surcharge options, you specified whether you want a single fuel surcharge line or one per line item. Below is an example of the fuel surcharge added to the end of the invoice.