2026–2027 WINTER SURVIVAL GUIDE
Your Tech Toolkit for Heating-Season Challenges
The Heating-Season Landscape
No heating season is predictable. But this year, fuel dealers are balancing several pressures at once.
Unpredictable Weather Could Impact Demand
Weather remains one of the biggest unknowns heading into winter, and expectations of a strong El Niño make this season particularly challenging to forecast. Mild weather could slow consumption, while periods of colder weather could quickly change which customers need fuel and when.
Changing Costs Put Pressure on Margins
Fuel dealers are managing changing fuel and operating costs while customers are paying close attention to what they spend. Getting pricing right means protecting the margins the business needs without losing sight of what customers can absorb.
Customer Balances Could Tighten Cash Flow
When customers are paying more for fuel, they may reach credit limits sooner or have difficulty paying outstanding balances. That creates more than a collections problem. Fuel dealers may have more accounts to review, more deliveries placed on hold, and more decisions to make about who can receive fuel and when.
Uncertain Demand Makes Every Resource More Important
Uncertain demand makes it harder to perfectly match staffing and delivery capacity to the season. A milder season can change staffing needs, while periods of high demand can quickly put pressure on the available people and equipment. At the same time, higher operating costs make every inefficiency more expensive.
Excellent Service Matters Even More
When customers are paying close attention to costs, their experience becomes an important opportunity to demonstrate value. Runouts, missed expectations, or poor communication can make an already price-sensitive customer question the relationship. Fuel dealers can’t control the unpredictable nature of the heating season. They can control how reliably they deliver, how accurately they communicate, and how well they take care of customers when the unexpected happens.
What Can You Control?
You can’t control the weather or commodity markets. You can’t know exactly how demand will develop.
But you can control how prepared your operation is to respond.
The right technology can give your team better information, reduce unnecessary work, and give you more options when conditions change.
In this guide, we’ll look at how technology can help you:
- Identify customer needs early and prevent runouts
- Make the most of every truck, driver, and mile
- Give customers timely answers and excellent service
- Protect profitability and keep cash moving
It all starts with something even more fundamental: the data behind your technology.
It Starts with Data
Good Technology Still Requires Good Data
Even the best technology can't overcome bad data. Forecasting, ticket pulls, routing, pricing, and customer service all depend on the information in your system. Outdated or incorrect data can throw off forecasts, create inefficient routes, and leave your team working with bad customer information.
At best, this slows your team down when you can least afford it. At worst, it can lead to customer problems like misfired notifications, missed deliveries, or runouts.
That's why a data review should be part of your heating-season preparation.
Before demand picks up, set aside time to review the information your team will rely on all winter. Depending on your operation, that could include:
- Customer and contact information
- Tank records
- Delivery settings
- Forecasting information
- Pricing formulas
- Account status
- Operational data used to make decisions
A pre-season data audit gives your team an opportunity to find outdated or incomplete information while there's still time to address it. And the payoff carries throughout the rest of the heating season.
Need Help Getting Your Data Winter-Ready?
Make sure the information powering your heating-season decisions is ready for peak demand. Our team can work with you to identify information that needs attention before winter.
Who Needs Fuel, and When?
Tools to Prevent Runouts
Automatic customers are coming due. Will-call customers want deliveries. Monitored tanks are getting low. And changing temperatures can quickly affect how much fuel customers use.
When demand is unpredictable, identifying customer needs early becomes even more important. The worst time to discover a customer needs fuel is when their tank is already empty.
Your dispatcher needs to bring all the available information together to identify at-risk tanks and prioritize the right deliveries before a low tank becomes an emergency.
The earlier you can identify a potential runout, the more options you have to prevent it.
Forecast Demand Accurately
For automatic customers, it starts with forecasting.
When weather patterns are unpredictable, historical usage alone may not tell you everything you need to know about when the next delivery should happen. Look for tools that use forecasting methods like seasonal K-factors, degree days, baseloads, and customer usage to predict when deliveries will be needed.
But the process doesn't end there. As weather and customer usage change, you need a way to evaluate how accurate your predictions are over time.
Look for calibration tools that compare actual delivery history with projected usage. If reality doesn't match the forecast, your team can fine-tune future projections to avoid small drops or runouts.
Maintaining reliable forecasts helps you better predict who needs fuel and when during peak season.
Add Tank Monitor Readings to the Picture
For monitored tanks, you have a current tank-level reading. But your dispatcher can still miss critical deliveries if the readings live in one system while ticket pulls, routing, and dispatching live somewhere else.
Your fuel delivery software should bring monitor readings into the delivery process so your team doesn't have to jump between systems constantly.
Ideally, monitored tanks shouldn't be handled as a completely separate workflow. Your dispatcher should be able to manage monitored deliveries alongside automatic, scheduled, and will-call tanks.
Monitor readings can also reduce manual work by triggering delivery ticket creation when a tank meets a specified level.
How Folger Gas Uses Tank Monitors
"The way [Cargas Energy] works with the monitors gives us an advantage to be ahead of cold weather to make sure our customers are taken care of."
—Kim Folger, Co-Owner, Folger Gas
Turn Information Into Priorities
Forecasts and tank readings don't accomplish much if your dispatcher still has to sort through everything manually to figure out what matters.
The next step is turning all that information into delivery priorities. This is especially important during peak season when you might have more demand than capacity.
Your dispatcher should be able to use selection filters to quickly identify at-risk tanks and decide which customers need attention first.
Get Ahead of Winter Weather
Sometimes the right delivery isn't the one that's due today. It's the one that will be difficult to make tomorrow.
A storm can make driving conditions hazardous, customers harder to reach, and available capacity even tighter.
It's not enough to know the storm is coming. You need the flexibility to change your delivery plans. Your fuel delivery system should help you adapt by pulling deliveries forward before conditions get worse.
How Ed Staub & Sons Minimizes Runouts
During Ed Staub & Sons' first winter with Cargas Energy, several plants faced extremely cold conditions while the company dealt with a propane shortage. With better insight into customers' fuel needs, the team could identify which tanks needed deliveries most urgently, prioritize those customers, and minimize runouts.
"It really took the guesswork out of it for us."
—Mark Paulson, Credit Manager, Ed Staub & Sons.
Heating-Season Check
Can your team:
- Predict when automatic customers will need fuel?
- See when actual usage doesn't match the forecast?
- Use tank monitor readings in delivery planning?
- Quickly identify which deliveries need attention first?
- Pull deliveries ahead of bad weather?
If not, your team may be reacting to runout risk instead of getting ahead of it.
How Inter-Island Propane Adapts When Conditions Change
Inter-Island Propane delivers fuel across Washington state's San Juan Islands, where weather and transportation complicate everyday delivery operations. Before one winter storm, the team adjusted its Cargas Energy settings so deliveries would be pulled earlier than usual. Instead of waiting until tanks reached the team's usual 35% level, they began pulling at 45% full.
That helped the team reach customers ahead of the storm.
Make It Easier to Do Business With You
Heating season isn’t the only time outdated or disconnected technology creates extra work. From customer sign-up and self-service to delivery visibility, payments, and communication, small roadblocks can frustrate your customers and your team. See how technology can help you remove friction across the entire customer journey.
Peak Demand Puts Every Route to the Test
Tools to Improve Delivery Efficiency
Peak demand often means you have more deliveries than trucks, drivers, and hours in the day. And as operating costs rise, every unnecessary mile, inefficient stop, or manual process becomes more expensive.
To make the most of every resource, your dispatcher has to balance customer needs, drop size, and route density across the entire fleet.
Your routing tools should help your dispatcher see the full picture, build efficient routes, and make adjustments as the day changes.
Balance Drop Size with Route Density
Optimizing deliveries for drop size can help improve efficiency, but tank level isn't the only factor your dispatcher considers.
Imagine a customer isn't quite ready for an ideal delivery based on fill level alone. If your driver will be servicing several nearby customers already, making that delivery now may still improve the overall efficiency of the route.
Your routing tools should help your dispatcher see both sides of the decision: which tanks need fuel and what other tanks are nearby.
From there, your dispatcher can use their knowledge and experience to balance drop size, route density, customer need, and available capacity.
Make Every Truck and Mile Count
Route optimization isn't just about putting stops in the best order. It's about making the driver's entire day more efficient.
Where does the truck start and end? Will the driver need to reload? Which route is best for a new stop?
Your dispatcher should be able to see multiple routes at once and make adjustments across the entire fleet instead of optimizing each route individually.
Better planning helps make your drivers' time on the road count.
Keep Routes Flexible After Dispatch
No matter how carefully you plan the day, your routes won't always stay exactly as you built them. Especially during heating season, will-call and emergency deliveries can easily disrupt the plan.
Your routing tools should give dispatchers the flexibility to make adjustments after trucks are already on the road. They should be able to see what's happening across the fleet, determine where a change fits, update the route, and send new information directly to the driver.
How Cubby Oil & Energy Manages Winter Demand
During heating season, Cubby Oil & Energy sometimes has more than 20 trucks on the road each day.
Building that many routes used to take five or six people half the day. With Cargas Energy, one person can build the routes for all 20 trucks.
Heating-Season Check
Can your dispatchers:
- See what's happening across the day's routes?
- Balance customer need, drop size, and route density?
- Make the most of available trucks and drivers?
- Adjust routes after drivers are already on the road?
Your Customer Needs Help. How Quickly Can You Respond?
Tools to Provide Excellent Service
When customers are watching costs closely, the experience you provide becomes another opportunity to demonstrate value.
Your customers don't see the route changes, emergency calls, driver schedules, and delivery backlog happening behind the scenes. They only know they need fuel, and they expect you to come through.
Reliable deliveries, accurate information, and clear communication help reinforce why customers choose to do business with you.
Give Your CSRs the Answer
Your CSRs want to provide a high level of service. But if delivery information lives with the driver, customer details are outdated, or your team has to search multiple places for an answer, even a simple question becomes work.
Your CSRs should have quick access to the account and delivery information they need to answer routine questions.
When the back office is connected to what's happening in the field, your office can follow delivery progress in real time instead of turning every status question into a phone call to the driver.
How Koppy's Propane Stopped Putting Customers on Hold
Koppy's Propane describes the difference real-time delivery information makes for its office team. They can see when tickets are in progress and when they're complete.
"We can provide answers a lot quicker this way."
Respond When a Customer Needs You
Responding to an emergency isn't just an operational problem. It's a moment that can make or break customer trust.
When your team can see what's happening across the day's routes, quickly determine how to accommodate an emergency stop, and communicate the change to the driver, you set your CSR up for success.
Instead of "We'll see what we can do," they can set clear expectations for what happens next.
When customers need you most, a fast response and a clear answer can turn a stressful situation into a reason to trust you.
Communicate Before the Customer Calls
Answering questions quickly is critical, but what if customers didn't have to ask in the first place?
Customer portals and other self-service tools can let customers access account information and complete routine tasks. Automated communications can also keep customers informed about upcoming deliveries or service activity.
Proactive communication reduces uncertainty for the customer while reducing routine work for your team. And when customers do call, your team has more time for the conversations that require their expertise.
Heating-Season Check
Can your team:
- Quickly find the information needed to answer customer questions?
- Follow delivery progress in real time?
- Give customers a clear answer when they need an urgent delivery?
- Communicate proactively so customers don't always have to ask?
If not, routine questions and urgent problems may create unnecessary friction and make it harder to deliver the experience customers expect.
More Gallons Are Moving. More Money Is at Stake.
Tools to Protect Profitability & Cash Flow
Heating season can put pressure on both sides of your financial picture.
You're buying and selling more fuel while costs are fluctuating. Customers may be watching their spending more closely, carrying larger balances, or reaching credit limits sooner. At the same time, your team has more transactions and account activity to manage.
Your technology should help you execute your pricing strategy consistently, avoid increasing balances that are already overdue, make it easier for customers to pay, and keep payment information connected to the rest of your operations.
Keep Pricing Current Across the Operation
Protecting your margin starts with keeping costs and customer pricing up to date.
When rack prices change, your team shouldn't have to recalculate customer prices and update every affected area of your system individually.
Instead, new rack prices should flow into your software automatically. From there, your pricing rules should do the work. Your fuel delivery system should let you establish formulas for calculating customer pricing based on your costs.
When the underlying rack price changes, those formulas can automatically recalculate the appropriate customer pricing and apply the changes across the operation. This includes existing delivery tickets and tickets that have already been dispatched.
Automating cost and price changes reduces manual work and helps protect your margins as costs fluctuate.
Don't Add to a Balance You Haven't Collected
If a customer already owes you money, you don't want another delivery to increase their outstanding balance.
Your software should carry account holds through to delivery tickets, helping your team avoid unintended deliveries. Once the account returns to good standing, the appropriate tickets should be released so service can resume without unnecessary manual work.
Make It Easier for Customers to Pay
When customers are carrying larger balances or watching their spending more closely, removing unnecessary friction from the payment process becomes even more important.
Your software should offer customers convenient ways to take action without involving your office in every transaction. Online payments let customers pay when it's convenient, while autopay can remove the need to initiate routine payments altogether.
The easier you make it for customers to pay, the more likely you are to receive timely payments while reducing work for your team.
Keep Payments Connected
When payments happen outside your fuel delivery software, your team has another system to manage and another place to find information.
When payment processing is built into your fuel delivery software, your team can manage payments and access payment information without switching systems. Payment activity stays connected with the customer account and the rest of your workflows, reducing the time and effort required to review, reconcile, and manage settlement batches.
Heating-Season Check
Can your team:
- Automatically apply cost and pricing changes across your system?
- Keep pricing current on dispatched delivery tickets?
- Prevent unintended deliveries to accounts on hold?
- Give customers convenient self-service ways to pay?
- Manage payment information without jumping between systems?
If not, your current processes may be cutting into your margins, putting more pressure on cash flow, or adding manual work during your busiest months.
Ready for Whatever Winter Brings?
Heating season has a way of uncovering what your software can and can't do.
If preventing runouts, getting deliveries to the right customers, providing the level of service they expect, or protecting your financial performance is harder than it should be, pay attention.
Those frustrations aren't just the result of a busy heating season. They're clues about what your technology should be doing better.
