Photo: Kevin Bretthauer, FuelCloud
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
April 9, 2025
Fuel management is a critical area where fleet managers can save both time and money. It’s imperative to track fuel usage to prevent waste and theft, but relying on manual methods is inefficient and unnecessary.
FuelCloud touts that its system integrates directly with a fleet’s existing database software, delivering real-time visibility on fuel usage from a web-based dashboard that you can access from any device. The company can generate custom reports for sharing with necessary departments, and it provides pre-filled tax forms to help obtain maximum tax refunds. Best of all, it gives fleet managers insight into fuel use for minimizing waste and exerting tighter control over driver access.
To learn more about how FuelCloud works, we spoke with Kevin Bretthauer, a co-founder and vice president of sales:
What is FuelCloud, and how do you make fleet managers’ jobs easier?
FuelCloud is a fuel management system–an ATM on an onsite bulk fuel tank at your location. We allow you to control the tank and who has access to it. We also track everything that goes in and out, available on our backend website and accessed from anywhere. This is very helpful for fleet managers because they don’t want to think about fuel, but they still need to do something about it. We allow them to track their fueling and run specialized reports.
We also have many integrations and an API, which lets them integrate the data anywhere it wants to go. If you’re using other fleet management software and want to integrate the data for cost per mile or miles per gallon maintenance, for example, you don’t have to worry about pen and paper–we’ll integrate it with the rest of the tools you use to manage your business.
We streamline and automate everything about fuel to make it easier for the fleet manager. We have a tool for running reports related to [the International Fuel Tax Association or] IFTA, which can save time and money. We do automatic tax refund completion at the state level, so if you ever put an on-road tax fuel into an off-road vehicle, we’ll automatically track that by vehicle and insert the necessary information into the individual state return. All you need to do is print, check, sign, and submit it. We also provide a similar service at the federal level.
Ultimately, it’s about ensuring the fuel goes where it should. Fleet managers can track relevant information–job numbers, odometer readings, shift numbers–and we put it at their fingertips so they don’t have to keep thinking about it.
Tell me about your reporting capabilities. How can that help fleet managers?
Reporting is like going to the dentist–everyone needs to do it, but they do it to varying degrees. Our reports are special because they’re savable, and you can have them automatically delivered in several ways, such as by email or sending them to a place on your server. You can customize every aspect of that, from the formatting of a field to dragging and dropping the order.
That’s important because when you get these reports, you either want to get helpful information for yourself or send it to someone else who needs it. Instead of pulling up a report and massaging it for an hour every week to give to your accountant, you can have it automatically emailed to them so they can upload it into their ERP. Then, because they’re saved, you can go into each one without having to recreate it from scratch every time.
What types of fleets do you work with?
We are used in fleets of all sizes nationwide, but medium to large fleets benefit most. Anything with 10 vehicles or more is a good fit for us. Fleets such as landscapers may be smaller, but they have a lot of complex onsite fueling needs, such as two-cycle oil off-road fueling. There’s much benefit in getting that tax money back if you don’t have a big internal department to file paperwork and tax returns.
Things like the IFTA reporting can be huge for medium- and large-size fleets. Managing multiple locations and different departments can get very complex very quickly. We can take something complex and make it simple. Within our system, you can break those down to match your business. You can see everything on one level, then go deeper if you want to. If you can manage online banking, then you can manage FuelCloud. It’s not designed to require 10 layers of education to take care of your business. We always do end-user webinars, so people who want to learn more about how we do can ask questions and get to know our software.
We have an open API and extensive integration setups for larger fleets and more sophisticated fleet managers. Fuel is often one part of a larger stack of software processes and other things you have to manage. Life becomes more straightforward and manageable when those fuel transactions move where they need to go without much manual intervention.
Can you share a success story?
We help many fleets with issues, most of which are mundane, such as simply maintaining accountability for where the fuel goes. One client we have is located in Texas. They weren’t gathering any off-road taxes, and they had equipment-moving vehicles moving around in their lot. The first thing we did was track their fuel to get their money back. The average client who uses our tax refund tools qualifies for a typical refund of over $20,000. Getting that usually requires a lot of manual work; otherwise, it’s money they’re not getting.
In the case of our client, they got that money and then had an audit by the Texas State Fuel Auditor’s Department. We heard from the person giving the inspection onsite that it was the first 100% he’d given on an audit. That speaks to what we can do to get our money back. You can trust it as a fleet manager because the last thing you want to do is open a box and then have to deal with everything that comes out of it. So, we try to provide end-to-end in terms of how we provide that service and value.
Tell me about the history of your company. How did it come about?
I started FuelCloud with my sister Alex. We’re fourth-generation fuel distributors, dating back to our great grandpa, who started with Union Oil, servicing local companies in 1928. Then, 10 years ago, when we got out of college, we were selling fuel and talking to fleet managers managing gold fuel. They kept having the same questions about wanting to have access to their data track so they could see where things were going and have better security. There were solutions on the market, but they were very hardware-focused and stuck in technology–what I would describe as the 1980s DOS line commands, server-based specific applications.
Our approach was to take everything we knew about technology and apply it to the fuel management space. We make a piece of hardware [that is] assembled in the United States [and is] UL certified and goes on the tank, but all the control and management is done on the backend website and the cloud with either mobile apps or onsite pedestals. We used our experience to bring that industry into the 21st century. Now, in 2025, when fleet managers have integrated systems with GPS tracking and telematics maintenance, our data from fueling can work with all those things. Previously, it was very difficult or very manual to do that with any other system.
What is something that genuinely sets FuelCloud apart from its competitors?
If you’re a fleet manager with onsite fuel, most of what’s available for purchase to help control that [the onsite fuel] is designed by people who offer a million different product lines. They don’t understand what it is you do. With FuelCloud, we work with the end users because we come from an industry where we deliver the fuel and manage our fleet of 50+ vehicles. We’re coming from the same space and helping solve the same problems.
We continuously work with our end-user customers because we have 30 full-time developers, and 75% of our employees are in product development, not sales. We can make changes and adapt to the times, unlike the competition, which is farming out contractors to make their software and install updates, forcing you to buy a new version every five years. For example, if there’s a new regulation related to IFTA, we can have that out in months and not years. As a fleet manager, you can’t just put a band-aid on everything related to fuel until somebody fixes it. You have enough things to manage–we want to be a partner who can take fuel off your hands so you don’t have to think about it.
