I’m currently working on a project that looks to simplify Fuel Surcharge / diesel floater policies - essentially a website that could be used by shippers, carriers or freight brokers to manage/calculate virtually any fuel surcharge policy.
Project came about after being heavily involved in the pain of dealing with multiple policies at my previous employer (large European digital freight forwarder).
I’m hoping to have a few conversations to understand current pain points and the monthly (or weekly) process you go through when working with them.
Not looking to sell anything, just trying to gain a bit of insight into how things work today to help inform how I build the product.
If you have involvement in creating Fuel Surcharge policies, interpreting/calculating fuel adjustments or have to adapt invoices to account for the fuel surcharge, would love to talk!
Let me know on this thread or via DM and I’ll be in touch.
In all the UK haulage companies I’ve worked in, the fuel surcharge was base rated at a generic agreed figure with the customer, some companies 90p a litre, some £1 etc.
Then every 1p paid over this per litre was 1% fuel surcharge.
I’m not sure how this would work over multiple countries but I guess you would use the most expensive country and base it off that.
The seemingly standard policy is a weekly price is emailed to a key contact list at all our customers every Monday and every job invoiced that week would incur X% fuel surcharge.
This is obviously easier for those on fuel cards with weekly prices, I have worked in some operations where fuel bunkers were used so the surcharge was based on the latest tank price. This proved interesting as some competitors in the area were fuel card only so prices sometimes higher, it would effect freight volumes.
Some companies I have seen go to great lengths to make it as complex and bewildering for the customer as possible and I’ve never understood why.
European policies I’ve dealt with have generally been monthly or quarterly updates - didn’t realise the UK standard was a weekly change.
Did you end up negotiating with the customer over what the 90p per litre/ £1 per litre ‘benchmark’ was, or was the customer generally using the same figure across all their UK suppliers (so it was a ‘take it or leave it’ scenario)?
In terms of adding on that surcharge on to the invoices a weekly basis, think that process could be smoothed at all? Is the invoicing/invoice adjustment process something that would typically be done in Excel or would you be using accounting/TMS type software for this? The intention with the product I’m building is that those fuel surcharge adjustments could be automatically fed through into Excel / GoogleSheets, but obviously if that’s not the way the adjustments are made, not going to be much help…
Certainly have seen the “go to great lengths to make it as complex and bewildering for the customer as possible” on some of the European policies I dealt with!
Part of what I’m trying to solve is to convert those into something understandable, calculates everything for you and just gives the figures you need, so in some ways good for me that these exist in the UK market as well.
I’m currently working on a project that looks to …
OK(ish) so far.
Amsterdamnick:
Not looking to sell anything, …
Maybe not just yet, but your use of the word “product” tends to suggest (to us at TN) that you might be working towards something that may be for sale in the future, which under the forum rules may make your OP a disguised advert. We tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that’s now all used up.
Amsterdamnick:
If you have involvement in creating Fuel Surcharge policies, interpreting/calculating fuel adjustments or have to adapt invoices to account for the fuel surcharge, would love to talk!
I’m hoping to have a few conversations to understand current pain points and the monthly (or weekly) process you go through when working with them.
Let me know on this thread or via DM and I’ll be in touch.
The Private Message (PM) system is the best way to go about this.