FastDragon Books is a full accounting suite, built in and built for fuel. It stands on its own, with a complete general ledger, double-entry journals, period locking, and financial statements. If you would rather keep QuickBooks or another system, FastDragon feeds it: every fuel document posts a balanced journal entry, and one export carries those entries into the ledger your accountant already runs. This page covers both paths, including the exact import mechanics.
FastDragon Books: a full accounting suite
You do not need a second system to keep the books. FastDragon Books is a complete back office accounting suite, included and built for the way fuel businesses actually run.
- A full general ledger and chart of accounts.
- Double-entry journal entries, with draft and post control.
- Two-gate period locking, so a closed month stays closed.
- Financial statements: profit and loss, balance sheet, trial balance.
- Bank reconciliation against your statement.
- A GL snapshot on every invoice line, frozen against later changes.
Every fuel invoice, agent settlement, and store close posts straight to the books. There is no re-keying and no exporting to a separate program just to see where you stand.
How the QuickBooks integration works
Integration starts at the ledger. Each document FastDragon saves already exists as a balanced journal entry, and the export reads those posted entries rather than the source documents. What lands in QuickBooks matches FastDragon's trial balance for the same period, line for line.
At close, you pick a date range and download one export file. Each row is a single debit or credit line and carries the date, entry number, source document reference, account code and name, memo, and amount. QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise read journal entries through Intuit's built-in IIF import. The US edition of QuickBooks Online takes the same entries through an importer app such as SaasAnt or Transaction Pro.
Setup is a one-time mapping. FastDragon's account codes are matched to your QuickBooks chart of accounts during onboarding, and after that the file imports without hand-editing. Before each import, compare the export totals to the trial balance for the same range. They should agree to the penny.
A worked example. One 7,500-gallon diesel load sold to a dealer account exports as three lines:
- Debit Accounts Receivable: $21,367.50
- Credit Fuel Sales (Diesel): $19,537.50
- Credit Fuel Taxes Payable: $1,830.00 (7,500 gallons at 24.4 cents)
Your accountant sees one balanced entry with the BOL-to-invoice reference in the memo line, instead of a stack of tickets to key. The tax line uses the federal diesel excise rate of 24.4 cents per gallon, unchanged since 1993. State rates stack on top and move often, so confirm current figures in our fuel tax guide before quoting a customer.
Using something other than QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is the system we test against, and the export itself is a plain file of balanced debit and credit lines. Most ledgers accept that. Xero imports manual journals from a CSV template. Sage 50 has a general journal import. If your accountant's system can import a journal entry, it can take FastDragon's output. And if you would rather skip the outside system entirely, FastDragon Books carries the whole load on its own.
Why fuel work needs fuel software underneath
A general ledger records dollars after the fact. The hard part of a fuel business happens before the entry exists: pricing a load off the rack, matching a BOL to a supplier invoice, settling a commissioned agent, splitting store margin by item. QuickBooks has no screens for that work, so operators end up running it in spreadsheets and keying the results in twice.
FastDragon does that work natively. Rack pricing, BOL matching, fuel tax, agent settlements, wet-stock reconciliation, and per-item c-store margin are built in for the jobber, the c-store, the fleet, and the commissioned agent. The accounting falls out the back as a finished entry. See where it all comes together on the features page.
What people ask
Can one QuickBooks company file track more than one business entity?
Within a single company file, QuickBooks Class or Location tracking can tag every transaction line with an entity code, which gives you a per-entity profit and loss without separate files. Most multi-entity fuel operators still keep one company file per legal entity for tax filing, then use classes for divisions inside each. Ask your CPA which split matches how your returns are filed.
Why would QuickBooks reject an imported journal entry?
The three common causes are an account name that does not exist in the chart of accounts, debits and credits that do not balance, and a date that falls in a closed period. QuickBooks fails the mismatched line rather than guessing at an account. Fix the account list or the date and run the import again.
What is an IIF file?
IIF stands for Intuit Interchange Format, a tab-delimited text format that QuickBooks Desktop reads through File, then Utilities, then Import. Each journal entry is written as a TRNS line, one or more split lines, and an ENDTRNS line. QuickBooks Online does not read IIF, so Online users bring in journal entries from spreadsheets instead.
How often should a fuel distributor import entries into QuickBooks?
Once a month, as part of the close, is the rhythm most accountants prefer. Pull each batch for a contiguous date range so no day is skipped or doubled, and reconcile the bank statement after the import lands. Weekly works fine if a lender or partner wants fresher numbers.
Does importing journal entries into QuickBooks cost extra?
The IIF import in QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise is built in at no charge. QuickBooks Online users in the US should budget for an importer app from the Intuit app store, and most of those apps are subscription priced by transaction volume. Factor that into the Online versus Desktop decision if you post heavy fuel volume.