Every month a SIRA report lands in your inbox, and if you’re like most operators you read one line of it: Pass. Good. Delete. Here’s what the rest of it is telling you, in plain English.
The daily variance. For each tank, each day, the report reconciles what should be in the tank (yesterday’s dip, plus deliveries, minus sales) against what your dip says is actually there. The difference is the variance. A positive variance means the tank holds more than the records explain; negative means less. No single day means much on its own. Dips are taken by humans, metres over-pour slightly, fuel changes temperature. Individual days wobble.
The trend. This is the line that matters. Across a whole month, the random wobble cancels out and what’s left is the direction your tank is drifting. A tank drifting consistently downward, day after day, is telling you something no single dip can: fuel is going somewhere your records don’t explain. The Australian Standard sets the threshold at which that drift becomes reportable, and a month of data is what makes the maths reliable.
The result. Pass means the month reconciled within tolerance: your fuel is accounted for. Fail means a sustained loss beyond the regulatory threshold, and it comes with clear next steps. The one that confuses people is Inconclusive. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with the tank; it usually means something is wrong with the data. Too few dips, dips estimated rather than measured, a delivery entered on the wrong day. The analysis can’t distinguish a real loss from noise, so it refuses to guess. That refusal is a feature. A system that guesses is a system you can’t take to a regulator.
The recommendation. When a tank needs attention, the report says so specifically: check the calibration on these hoses, verify this delivery against the docket, tighten the dip routine on this tank. That line is the whole point of the exercise. It’s the difference between monitoring and a filing cabinet.
Read your report bottom-up. Recommendation first, that’s your action. Result second, that’s your status. And if you’re consistently seeing Inconclusive, the fix is almost always in the daily routine, not underground. Sixty seconds a month reading it properly is the cheapest insurance in fuel retail, and when the EPA or your insurer ever asks what monitoring you had in place, that stack of reports answers for you.
