Fuel Surcharges

There is no Federal Standard for calculating Fuel Surcharges. This means that you need to develop your own policy for this critical item.

All versions of Q-Shred allow you to apply either a fixed fuel surcharge or a percentage of the invoice as a fuel surcharge, but the best way is an automated variable surcharge which is based on the official EIA benchmarks for the price of diesel fuel in your area. Your customers may be suspicious of fixed rates or percentages as being a disguised price increase, but it’s hard to argue with a fuel surcharge based on the actual US Government statistics.  Q-Shred updates itself automatically every week to get the appropriate EIA data, and then automatically applies fuel surcharges to your invoices according to your business rules.  EIA-based variable fuel surcharges are available in the Essentials or Complete versions of Q-Shred. Traditionally this type of calculation is done with Miles Per Gallon, but MPG is a bad metric for mobile shredding trucks that burn as much (or more) fuel while standing still and shredding. ShredMetrics has developed custom algorithms to apply realistic fuel surcharge numbers just for the shredding industry.

The chart below is taken directly from the US Energy Information Administration, a part of the Department of Energy.  This chart updates every week, and if you mouse over the price of Low Sulfur Diesel you will see that we are clearly in uncharted territory.