83 days. 3,050 litres. One register.
A working Indian petrol pump handed us three months of its Daily Sales Register. We did the one thing nobody at the station had done — we added up the variation column. Here is what it said.
The column nobody fills in
Every DSR has a Cumulative Variation column. It exists for exactly one reason: to turn a harmless-looking daily figure into a number you cannot ignore. On all six sheets we received, that column was completely blank.
So the dealer saw −19 on the 1st. −23 on the 2nd. −7 on the 3rd. Nothing worth stopping the day for. Below is his actual June petrol register. Press the button and watch the column he never filled.
| Date | Variation (L) | Cumulative Variation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Jun | -19 | |
| 2 Jun | -23 | |
| 3 Jun | -7 | |
| 4 Jun | -14 | |
| 5 Jun | -15 | |
| 6 Jun | -17 | |
| 7 Jun | -23 | |
| 8 Jun | -30 | |
| 9 Jun | -29 | |
| 10 Jun | -29 | |
| 11 Jun | -23 | |
| 12 Jun | -30 | |
| 13 Jun | -28 | |
| 14 Jun | -12 | |
| 15 Jun | -30 | |
| 16 Jun | -14 | |
| 17 Jun | -28 | |
| 18 Jun | -11 | |
| 19 Jun | -18 | |
| 20 Jun | -14 | |
| 21 Jun | -21 | |
| 22 Jun | -10 | |
| 23 Jun | -14 | |
| 24 Jun | -13 | |
| 25 Jun | -24 | |
| 26 Jun | -9 | |
| 27 Jun | -27 | |
| 28 Jun | -36 | |
| 29 Jun | -20 | |
| 30 Jun | -22 | |
| June total | −610 L | — |
That is one product, one month. Petrol alone, June alone: 610 litres.
Now all six sheets
| Month | Product | Sold (L) | Variation (L) | % of sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May | MS (Petrol) | 38,300 | -415 | -1.08% |
| May | HSD (Diesel) | 28,707 | -468 | -1.63% |
| June | MS (Petrol) | 41,652 | -610 | -1.46% |
| June | HSD (Diesel) | 30,077 | -631 | -2.10% |
| July 1-23 | MS (Petrol) | 28,918 | -466 | -1.61% |
| July 1-23 | HSD (Diesel) | 19,747 | -460 | -2.33% |
| Total | Both | 1,87,401 | −3,050 | −1.63% |
163 red days out of 168
One dot per product per day across the 83 days. Red is a shortage, green is a gain, grey is a day the pump did not trade. If this were random measurement noise, roughly half would be green.
"It's just evaporation" — the numbers say otherwise
Petrol is far more volatile than diesel; it evaporates readily, diesel barely does. So if this loss were mostly evaporation, petrol should show the bigger percentage. It doesn't. It's the reverse.
Diesel — the fuel that barely evaporates — is the bigger loss. That points at measurement, meter drift or delivery shortfalls, not physics.
And it is getting worse
Month on month, for both products, the loss rate widened. This is not a stable leak — it is a growing one.
What TruFuelPro would have done
- Totalled it from day one. The cumulative figure is never blank — it updates itself after every shift close.
- Flagged the drift. Set a threshold per product; the moment the running variation crosses it, the owner is told — not three months later.
- Split it by product and by shift, so the question stops being "where did it go?" and becomes "which nozzle, which shift, which day?"
- Kept the paper format. Same columns, same register your staff already knows — just filled in for you.
To be fair to this dealer
Some of this is genuine evaporation and temperature movement — most oil companies treat roughly 0.5–0.75% as normal. The point of this report is not that the dealer was robbed. It is that nobody knew the number at all, because the column that would have shown it was empty.
Method & caveats
- Source: six DSR sheets (MS and HSD) for May, June and 1–23 July 2026 from one working pump. Shared with permission and fully anonymised — no dealer name or outlet.
- Totals: we summed the register's own Variation (H−G) column exactly as written. Nothing was recalculated or adjusted.
- Valuation: each month at that month's Cuddalore-district pump rate (petrol ₹104.50–109.00, diesel ₹95.50–99.00), interpolated between verified April and July rates and rounded down, so the figure is conservative.
- Annualised figures project the observed 83-day rate forward; they are an indication, not a forecast.
- This is one station. It is not a claim about every pump in India — it is an invitation to check your own.
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