Questions worth asking before you buy

CRA Sentinel — Cash Reconciliation & Audit Sentinel — is software for fuel and petrol stations. It takes the meter readings an attendant already writes down, works out what that fuel should have earned at the price it went out at, compares that against the cash, cards, transfers and expenses recorded for the shift, and reports the difference.

It also checks that each day’s opening reading continues the previous closing one, nozzle by nozzle, and keeps an append-only record of who entered every figure.

Station owners and the managers and attendants who run their forecourts. It is sold to organisations rather than to individuals, and it works the same whether you have one station or a dozen.

No. Meter readings are entered by a person, on a phone or a computer. That is a deliberate scope: automatic tank gauging and forecourt controllers vary enormously by site and by manufacturer, and a product that only worked where an integration existed would be useless at most stations.

It is also exactly why the continuity check exists. A wrong reading produces a wrong expectation, so every opening reading is compared against the closing one before it and any mismatch is flagged before the shift can close.

Closing meter minus opening meter gives litres. Litres multiplied by the price that applied when the fuel was sold gives the expected amount. Both are computed on the server in exact decimal arithmetic, never in binary floating point, and rounded once per nozzle to the currency’s two places.

The price is copied onto the reading when it is entered and never read back from the product afterwards. That is what makes a price change tomorrow leave yesterday’s takings alone.

Cash, POS and card, bank transfers, credit sales, vouchers, mobile money, other, plus any expense that was paid out of that shift’s takings and any approved adjustment.

An expense the company paid separately is deliberately excluded. The money never came out of the takings, so adding it would manufacture a surplus that does not exist — which is why the question is asked explicitly every time an expense is recorded.

No, and the product does not say so. A forecourt loses fuel to evaporation, to meter calibration drift, to a mis-keyed digit and to honest mistakes as well as to theft. CRA Sentinel reports the difference it measured and records who entered every figure; what the difference means is a judgement for the owner.

A discrepancy record is created with the previous closing reading, the entered opening reading, the exact difference, the nozzle, the person and the time. What happens next is your organisation’s setting: warn only, require a written explanation, or require a manager’s approval as well. The default is to require an explanation before the shift can be finalized.

A manager accepting a discrepancy does not remove it. The original readings and the difference stay exactly as recorded, and the acceptance is added to them with a name and a note.

A manager records a meter reset with the reading before, the new base reading and a reason. Nothing already recorded is edited or deleted; the next shift’s opening reading is checked against the new base instead, and the reset itself is in the audit trail.

You can set a variance tolerance and a meter tolerance. A difference at or below the tolerance is flagged as within tolerance rather than as something to chase — but the exact figure is always stored and always shown, and a shift is never reported as balanced because a difference was small.

Not directly. Finalizing locks it. A manager can reopen it, which requires a reason and is recorded; after that, every change to a figure also needs its own reason, and both the old and the new value are kept.

No. An attendant sees only the stations they are assigned to, can edit only their own shift, and cannot finalize anything. Those refusals are enforced on the server on every request; the interface hides what somebody cannot do as a courtesy, not as the control.

There is no route in the product that deletes an audit entry. Each entry’s hash covers the previous entry’s hash, so removing or editing one breaks every hash after it, and the console reports whether the chain still verifies every time it is read.

Yes. Every report exports as CSV — daily sales, shift by shift, by station, by product, by attendant, expenses, shortages and surpluses, meter discrepancies and payment methods — and so does the audit trail.

Any ISO 4217 currency, set per organisation. Nothing in the product assumes a country: naira, euro, pound, cedi, shilling and rand are all first-class, and amounts are formatted to the currency you chose.

A subscription is priced per organisation and covers a number of stations. Starter is €79 per month or €790 per year and covers up to 1 station. Growth is €199 per month or €1,990 per year and covers up to 10 stations. Beyond that, Enterprise pricing is agreed with you rather than published. Annual billing saves about 16.7% on either plan. Taxes may apply depending on billing details and applicable law.

Every capability is included on every plan. These prices are provisional and subject to final launch approval. See Pricing.

Adding a further station waits until there is room. Nothing you already have is removed, hidden or paused: every existing station, its pumps and nozzles, its shifts, its reports and its audit trail carry on exactly as before.

The product tells you which plan you are on and how many stations it covers before it refuses, so the next step is a decision rather than a puzzle. Moving up a plan is done from the billing portal.

You can still record readings, cash, cards and expenses, and still finalize a shift. A card decline does not make last night’s money add up, and a product that blocked the day’s accounting over a billing state would be actively harmful.

What stops is new capacity: adding another station, pump or nozzle. Everything already recorded stays readable and exportable. Deleting data is a separate, explicit request — see the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

CRA Sentinel is in free beta. Beta users can create an account and use the production application at no charge while we refine it with real station feedback. There is nothing to buy yet and no card is required.

Early access is the full production application, not a sandbox or a trial copy: add a station, add your pumps and nozzles, set your prices and close a real shift. What you record now is your data, in the system you will keep using.