Industry - Fuel Distribution

When a regulator asks why the price was what it was, most fuel ERPs only have an answer for what sold.

• “Our ERP can tell us what we sold. It can't tell us why the price was what it was.”

  Fuel ERP systems are built for order processing, not for the kind of audit trail regulators and auditors now expect.

• “When prices spiked, we knew we hadn't profiteered. We just couldn't easily prove it.”

  When the CMA investigated the heating oil market during a recent crisis, it cleared most distributors of profiteering, but found customers needed far greater confidence and access to redress, which starts with being able to show your working.

• “We have to be able to show our pricing was fair, even without a forecourt-style reporting scheme covering us.”

  The CMA has already used its powers to gather cost, revenue, and pricing data directly from heating oil and bulk fuel distributors during a recent crisis, and while most were cleared of profiteering, the ones with clean records were the ones who could prove it.

• “Every time we've looked at replacing our old system, we've been told it'll take months and lose data.”

  ERP transitions in this sector routinely expose years of poorly structured historical data, with auditors entitled to ask for the six years of records HMRC requires, detail that legacy systems can't produce cleanly.

An audit trail is more than paperwork. When someone asks, it is what proves you were fair.