By Johnny Bertucci, President
The quick take: ABC Fuel Distributors, an anonymized mid-size petroleum marketer with 15 suppliers and roughly 300 retail and commercial accounts, spent close to two hours every day manually pulling supplier prices, calculating the customer prices (with margins, freight, and taxes), and emailing price sheets to customers. It was a process that was time-consuming, prone to delay and errors. After adopting PriceWorks, that same process runs automatically, cutting daily pricing time by more than 80% and virtually eliminating pricing errors reaching customers.
Who They Are
ABC Fuel Distributors is your typical family-owned petroleum marketer, serving convenience stores, commercial fleets, and a handful of unbranded retail sites across a multi-county territory for over 3 decades. Looking to expand its operations, ABC must stay competitive on price every single day.
The Problem: Pricing the Manual Way
Every day at ABC, the pricing coordinator logged into each supplier’s website or FTP portal, one at a time, to check that day’s rack prices. Some suppliers sent prices by email instead, which meant checking three inboxes and cross-referencing timestamps to make sure nothing was missed or outdated. Once all the numbers were in hand, usually 45 minutes to an hour, the real work began: building customer-specific prices by layering in margins, freight, and state and local taxes, then double-checking the math in a spreadsheet that had been patched together and re-patched over the years.
On a normal day, the whole process took close to two hours before the first price sheet went out. On a volatile market day, it meant starting over. Because the process depended on manual entry, small errors were a constant risk. Each mistake meant either an awkward call to a customer about a wrong invoice or a margin quietly given away.
The Turning Point
ABC’s leadership had known for a while that the process didn’t scale. What finally moved them to act was realizing that every new supplier relationship or new customer account made the manual process measurably more fragile, right at the moment they wanted to grow. Additionally, their pricing coordinator wanted to take a vacation. Instead of handing the “house-of-cards” process to someone else, they decided to automate the process and chose PriceWorks.
The Solution: Pricing on Autopilot
ABC implemented PriceWorks to automate the parts of the process that had been eating the most time and carrying the most risk. Instead of logging into a dozen-plus supplier portals and inboxes each morning, PriceWorks pulls prices automatically from FTP feeds and emails into a single view. Margins, taxes, freight, and fees are applied automatically using rules ABC set up. Customer price sheets go out on a schedule.
The shift wasn’t just about speed. It changed what the pricing coordinator’s job actually looked like: instead of spending two hours of every day gathering and calculating numbers, she now spends a few minutes reviewing prices before they go out, and the rest of her day on the customer relationships and business analysis that is more valuable to a growing marketer.
The Results
Pricing time dropped by roughly 80%, price sheets went out consistently and on schedule rather than “whenever it’s done,” and the errors that used to require awkward customer calls became rare rather than routine. Just as important, there was a peace of mind that comes from knowing pricing will go out correctly whether or not any one person is in the office that day. As one real PriceWorks customer put it:
“PriceWorks takes care of the pricing for me, so I can spend time on growth opportunities.”
The Broader Takeaway
ABC’s story is a composite, but the pattern it reflects is common across the petroleum marketing industry. Manual pricing tends to work fine at a small scale and quietly becomes a liability as a business adds suppliers, customers, or complexity. Marketers who are still pricing manually today are often the last to notice the true cost, because the hours and the occasional error get absorbed into “just how the job is.” The businesses that get ahead of it tend to ask a simple question: what would our pricing team be doing with two extra hours a day, and how many of the growth opportunities we’re not chasing right now come down to not having that time?
About PriceWorks
PriceWorks, from RowLogic, is a fuel pricing automation platform built specifically for petroleum marketers. It collects supplier prices from FTP feeds and emails, automatically applies margins, taxes, freight, and fees, and delivers accurate customer pricing on a daily schedule. RowLogic has served petroleum marketers since 1991 and offers a 30-day free trial on PriceWorks and its other applications. Learn more at rowlogic.com.
This is an anonymized and composite scenario built from common patterns among petroleum marketers who price manually, intended to illustrate a realistic before-and-after with PriceWorks. It is not based on a single named customer.
