When 360 Jet Fuel asked us to build their next-generation fuel and ground handling platform, the brief was ambitious: replace a patchwork of spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems with a single platform that could handle fuel procurement, ground handling contracts, inventory tracking, real-time payments, and regulatory compliance — across hundreds of suppliers and airlines simultaneously.

This is a technical post-mortem of how we built it. What worked, what we had to rearchitect, and the decisions that let the platform scale to 250+ fuel suppliers and 250+ tail numbers without falling over.

The Domain Problem: Fuel Is Harder Than It Looks

Aviation fuel operations sit at the intersection of logistics, finance, and compliance. A single refueling event involves a supplier, a handler, an airline, an airport authority, and often a duty/tax authority — all of whom need to agree on what happened, when, and how much is owed.

The existing workflow was manual. Suppliers would submit invoices days after delivery. Handlers would log transactions in disconnected systems. Airlines would reconcile at the end of the month, manually matching uplift records against invoices. Disputes were common, resolution was slow, and nobody had real-time visibility into what was happening on the ground.

The core engineering challenge was not any single feature — it was making five different parties trust the same source of truth in real time.

The Contract and Inventory Layer

We built the contract management layer first. Every supplier-airline relationship is governed by a contract with specific terms: pricing tiers, volume commitments, duty rates, currency, and payment terms. These vary by airport, by fuel type, and by season.

The system models contracts as versioned, auditable documents — when terms change, the old version is preserved and the new version takes effect on a specified date. This was critical for dispute resolution: when a supplier and airline disagree on a price, the platform can show exactly which contract version was in effect at the time of delivery.

Inventory tracking runs on top of the contract layer. Every fuel delivery, every uplift, every transfer between storage facilities is recorded as an immutable transaction against the inventory ledger. The system maintains real-time stock levels per location and flags when inventory drops below contract-specified minimums.

Real-Time Payments and Duty Calculation

The biggest win for the client was automated, real-time payment settlement. In the old workflow, suppliers waited 30–60 days for payment. With the new platform, payments are triggered automatically when a delivery is confirmed by both parties.

Duty calculation was the most technically demanding part of the payments pipeline. Every airport has different tax and duty rules. Some jurisdictions charge per litre, some per kilogram, some as a percentage of value. Rates change — sometimes quarterly, sometimes with no notice. We built a rules engine that models duty as configurable, jurisdiction-specific policies that can be updated without code changes.

The multicurrency settlement layer handles FX conversion at the point of transaction, locks the rate, and reconciles across supplier and airline ledgers in their respective base currencies. We process all of this in near-real-time — the goal was zero dispatch intervention, and we got close.

Traceability and Compliance

In aviation, every litre of fuel needs a paper trail. The platform generates a complete chain of custody for every delivery: who supplied it, when it arrived at the airport, how it was stored, when it was loaded, which aircraft received it, and the duty paid.

This traceability layer was also the foundation for 360 Jet Fuel's SAF operations. When Sustainable Aviation Fuel enters the supply chain, the platform tracks its blend ratio, production pathway, and environmental attributes alongside the conventional fuel data. This is what eventually became the SAF registry that spun off into its own company at globalsaf.co.

Compliance reporting is automated. The platform generates regulatory submissions, tax filings, and audit packages on demand. No more end-of-month scrambles to assemble documentation from five different systems.

Lessons from Scaling to 250+ Suppliers

Multi-tenancy was the right architectural bet. Each supplier and airline sees only their own data, but the platform operator has a unified view. We implemented tenant isolation at the database level — not just application-level filtering — because a data leak between competing suppliers would destroy trust instantly.

Event sourcing saved us repeatedly. When a supplier's integration sent duplicate delivery records (this happened more than once), we could replay from the deduplicated event stream and have clean data within hours. Without event sourcing, we would have been reconciling manually for days.

Design for operator override from day one. No matter how good the automation is, there will be edge cases — unusual duty structures, disputed deliveries, contractual exceptions. We built an operator console that lets the 360 Jet Fuel team intervene at any point in the pipeline without breaking the audit trail. Every manual override is logged with a reason code and the identity of the person who made it.

The platform now processes thousands of transactions daily across 250+ fuel suppliers and 250+ tail numbers. It's live, it's scaling, and — most importantly — it works without anyone having to send an email or open a spreadsheet.