Diesel doubled this year. Your call-out fee probably didn't.

Investec's chief economist, Annabel Bishop, put a number on what every bakkie owner already feels: diesel has doubled this year, from R17.00 a litre in January to over R34.00. Petrol is up by a third over the same stretch. And November brings another increase.

The question for a service business is not whether fuel is expensive. It is whether your prices noticed.

What the latest data says

Central Energy Fund figures at the end of the third week of October, reported by TopAuto on Friday, point to diesel rising by R1.38 a litre in November, from R33.29 to R34.67 inland. 95 petrol is tracking an increase of R2.06, from R30.25 to R32.31.

That is better than it looked at the start of the month. In early October the same data pointed to a petrol increase of around R4.60 a litre. Brent crude is still trading at about $105 a barrel and the rand at R16.53 to the dollar, so the pressure has eased rather than gone away. Final prices are only announced a few days before they take effect.

Relief is possible but not settled. On 8 October Parliament's appropriations committee adopted its report on a bill that would move R10 billion to the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources to stabilise fuel costs. It still has to be debated in the National Assembly. The last big intervention, a R3 cut to the fuel levy in April, cost over R17 billion and has since lapsed.

Pricing on January's diesel is a discount nobody asked you to give.

Where it leaks out of a service business

Fuel rarely has its own line on a quote. It hides inside a call-out fee set last year, or inside a job price that assumed the van would make one trip, not three. When diesel doubles, those are the numbers that quietly stop adding up.

A few checks worth doing this week:

• Call-out and travel fees. If yours were last set when diesel was near R17, they now cover roughly half the fuel they used to.
• Quote validity. A quote sent in October and accepted in November is costed on October's fuel. A shorter validity period, or a line saying travel is charged at current rates, protects the margin without raising the headline price.
• Distance. Jobs far from base cost more than they did in January. A travel band by area is easier for customers to accept than a vague surcharge.
• Routing. Grouping site visits and jobs by area is the one fuel saving that needs no price change at all.

Most customers understand fuel costs. What they dislike is a surprise on the invoice. Our view is that the safest time to adjust is now, on the quote, in writing, before November's prices land, rather than after a job has already eaten the difference.

If relief does arrive before December, you can pass it on. Until then, the January price of diesel is not coming back to rescue last year's call-out fee.