3rd Decimal on Fuel Quantity Missing on Fuel Reports?

if you want to add more tin foil to your hat only fuel at night or in the early morning hours. fuel stations buy there fuel in net gallons witch accounts for thermal expansion and contraction of the fuel. but yet the pumps are only capable of measuring gross gallons.

if you were to 10,000 gallons of fuel that was at 30*F would be 10,207 net gallons of fuel

the same 10,000 gallons would only be 9,790 net gallons at 90*f

granted most fuel stations have in ground tanks and net is corrected to volume at 60* f and depending on the depth and the region the tanks are buried the ground should somewhat regulate the fuel to somewhere around there, of course they could have just dumped a hot load in those tanks that has been in the sun on a 100 degree day all day or a cold load in the winter. there are also stations that use above ground tanks where you are probably more likely to see a larger swing in fuel temperature. again not enough to worry about but its on the same level of the rounding of the thousandths of a gallon that your worried about.

if your that worried about it when your done fueling bump the trigger a couple times till your at .xx4 and really stick it to em.

 

no one is stealing your .001 of a gallon they are just simply rounding it up or down to the nearest hundredth of a gallon. even if they rounded from .001 to .010 witch isn't how rounding works and you had a fuel transaction every single day for a year 365 days it would add up to roughly $1.095 witch would round up to $1.10 btw its not some big conspiracy theory your the one grasping at straws. this thread is just silly like i said if your that concerned about it make sure that your fuel transaction always ends in a fuel quantity that rounds in your favor so you can "steal" from them.

edit to add
btw its really easy to make sure that they are rounding fairly by comparing your fuel report to the receipts that you collect when you pump your fuel.

 

Does the price on your EFS statement match what is printed on your fuel receipt from the store (less any correct discounts)? Rounding off the thousandth of a gallon on your fuel card transaction report doesn't change the sale price at the pump.

You're also worried about fuel surcharge in states like KY and VA. That's based on miles and your quarterly average mpg. If you think you're being ripped off there, all you have to do is record your precise fuel quantities separately or use your store receipts to get your state gallons correct to 6 digits and compare with the rounded figure off your EFS report. I would estimate the difference across an entire quarter might be a penny or two either way. But that's nothing EFS benefits from. It's a tax paid to a state based on EFS numbers.

Besides, anyone that stops the pump on an even quantity is foolish. You should make it stop on a random prime number. Anything else is just unlucky.

 

That was exactly my point. EFS isn't doing the math, the fuel pump is. EFS is only rounding the gallons reported, and they aren't the ones calculating the sale price. Call or email EFS support and ask them why they're doing that would be my suggestion.

For what it's worth, my FleetOne card went to EFS last quarter too, I just haven't run my reports to make that rounding discovery yet.

Also, when I enter my IFTA values in the Georgia DOR web return, gallons must be entered with no decimal. So I use the rounding function in my spreadsheet, although the math is done with the actual values. When the sum is off by a gallon, i just add a gallon to a low tax state like SC, or subtract a gallon from a high tax state like PA and force balance it. Using those choices means I'm not making a change that's favorable to me, so less likely to raise any red flags at an audit. In either case the difference is a few cents at most. The DOR auditors don't care about that. They are looking for deliberate fraud or incompetency, not rounding errors.

Speaking of which, I did get an IFTA/IRP audit about 3 yrs ago. Lets just say my methods of coming up with those numbers changed a little across the three years being reviewed. I was able to walk the auditor through my methods and raw data, and he was satisfied with the returns that were reviewed. I passed the audit with no discrepancies found.

 

That's not correct. The surcharge is on the calculated gallons used in the state, based on your miles and quarterly average mpg, not tax paid (purchased) gallons. If you drove in a surcharge state, you'll pay that tax regardless if you bought any fuel there.

Since there is no way to correlate the state mileage you might run to a per gallon rate, NASTC is doing the only thing possible which is to leave it off. Only you can estimate that added cost with a prediction of how many miles you expect to run there. For expense projections, it would probably work better to figure that surcharge as a cost per mile to operate in that state versus a fuel tax line item due to how it works. Don't confuse the fact that this tax has the word "fuel" in it to necessarily mean that it inflates the cost of fuel. It's a calculated value collected on your IFTA return, not an amount added to the price of fuel at a pump.

Contrast that to how NASTC includes sales taxes in the net cost in states where it is included in the pump price (Georgia, New York, California, and two more I can't think of at the moment). You have to pump fuel in the state to pay it, so it's simple to include that in the net cost per gallon. You can avoid that tax by not purchasing fuel in those states.