Daily tank reconciliation — the routine, step by step

Reconciliation is a simple question asked every day: does the fuel in the tank match what the book says should be there? The book is arithmetic, not opinion:

Book = yesterday's stick + today's deliveries − today's sales, where today's sales are the pump totalizer's movement since yesterday.

The three numbers

1. Stick reading. Dip the tank at the same time each day — most owners do it at close or before open — and convert inches to gallons with that tank's chart. Same time, same person, same care: a sloppy stick is the number-one cause of false alarms.
2. Delivery gallons. When a load drops, log the bill-of-lading gallons that day, and stick the tank right before and after the drop when you can. Delivery days are where the biggest honest mistakes — and short deliveries — hide.
3. Pump totalizer. Write down the running meter total for each grade at the same moment you stick. Today's total minus yesterday's is what you sold; you never have to add up individual sales.

The check

Compare the book to today's stick. The difference is the day's variance. Small differences — a few gallons either way — are normal: sticks are read to the nearest eighth of an inch, fuel expands and contracts with temperature, and meters are mechanical. What matters is a difference that is big (a working flag rule: over 50 gallons, or over 0.5% of the day's sales) or repeated (the same direction, day after day — that's a pattern, and patterns are leaks, drift, or theft until proven otherwise).

Why daily, when the rule is monthly?

The formal inventory-control comparison is monthly, but a monthly check finds a problem up to thirty days after it started — and by then the delivery ticket is cold and the trail is gone. A daily check catches a short delivery while the distributor still remembers the load, and a drifting meter while the pattern is three days old instead of ninety. Georgia's UST guidance already asks for the daily habit: stick readings every day, an end-of-month log for each tank, and compliance records retained for three years.

Official source: Summarized UST Compliance Inspection Records Guidance (Georgia) — daily stick readings, month-end logs, three-year record retention. Federal inventory-control standard: 40 CFR Part 280, Subpart D.

Do today's reconciliation in the free book

More guides: Fuel variance · The UST inventory log · Days-to-empty