What Petrosoft is
Petrosoft is a cloud software company building back-office and point-of-sale products for convenience stores, gas stations and fuel distributors. By its own account it was founded in 2002 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Sergei Gorloff, described on the company site as a retail operator and engineer, and its products reach more than 5,000 retail locations worldwide.
The founding detail is worth keeping, because it explains the product. Petrosoft describes itself as "founded in 2002 by a retailer who needed better tools", and it still operates its own gas station brand, Market24. A back office built by someone who had to close the books on their own stores tends to be organised around the tasks that actually consume a manager's week rather than around a database schema.
The product line
Petrosoft's site names a connected set of products rather than one application:
| Product | What it does |
|---|---|
| CStoreOffice | The cloud back-office platform |
| SmartPOS | Point-of-sale hardware and software |
| Fuel-Central | Fuel management |
| Loss Prevention Analytics | Shrink and exception reporting |
| Foodservice technology | Made-to-order and foodservice operations |
What CStoreOffice does
CStoreOffice is the piece that matters for packaged goods. It is the back office in the sense this site uses the term: item file, invoice reconciliation, inventory, margin reporting and cash control, delivered as cloud software rather than a server in the back room. Fuel-Central is named for completeness and is outside what this site writes about.
SmartPOS is the register side of the same estate, and the distinction matters when you are tracing where a number came from. SmartPOS records the transaction; CStoreOffice reconciles it against cost, invoice and count. A figure that disagrees between the two is usually a reconciliation question rather than a scanning one. Petrosoft also ships Retail360, a mobile app over the same back office — worth knowing because at least three unrelated products share that name.
Where it sits in the market
Petrosoft and PDI Technologies are frequently named in the same breath and serve noticeably different operators. The distinction is scale.
| Petrosoft | PDI Technologies | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 | 1983 |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh, PA | Alpharetta, GA |
| Stated reach | 5,000+ retail locations | 200,000+ sites, 60+ countries |
| Typical operator | Single site to small chain | Large chain, petroleum wholesaler |
That gap is not a quality judgment, it is a segment. The NACS 2026 store count records 95,672 US convenience stores, 63% of the total, belonging to companies that operate ten stores or fewer. Those operators are a large and genuinely underserved market, and cloud back-office software priced for a single site is the product built for them.
What this means for the data you receive
If a brand receives data originating from a small operator running CStoreOffice, three differences from a large-chain export show up immediately.
The estate is small, so the noise is large. A four-store operator's weekly movement on a mid-velocity SKU can be a handful of units. Week-to-week swings that would be signal at 400 stores are just variance at four, and treating them as trends produces confident nonsense.
Category structure is bespoke and hand-maintained. A chain with a category management function keeps its department tree deliberate. A single-site operator configured theirs once, at install, and has adjusted it opportunistically since. Expect departments that mix pack sizes, a generic bucket absorbing anything unfamiliar, and at least one department whose name no longer describes its contents.
The pricebook carries more drift. The same operator maintaining the item file is also covering shifts. The four decay sources described in the retail pricebook entry all run faster without a dedicated pricing role, and cost fields are usually the first to go stale.
None of that makes the data unusable. It makes it data that needs its provenance stated before conclusions get drawn from it, which is true of every retailer file and simply more visible here.
The EDI and scan data piece
One line on Petrosoft's product list matters more to brands than the rest: the company lists EDI and scan data processing among its services. That is the plumbing by which a distributor's electronic invoices arrive in the item file without rekeying, and by which movement data leaves the store in a structured form.
For an operator it removes the manual step described in the back office entry, where 350 invoice lines a week arrive faster than anyone can check them. For a brand it is the reason data from small operators is available at all. A four-store operator has no data team and no intention of building an export; if their scan data reaches you, it reaches you because their back-office vendor sends it as a standard feed. The vendor, not the retailer, is what determines the shape and the cadence of what you receive, which is worth knowing before you ask a small operator to change either.
The short version
- Petrosoft, founded 2002 in Pittsburgh, builds cloud back-office and POS software for convenience stores, gas stations and fuel distributors.
- CStoreOffice is its back-office platform; SmartPOS, Fuel-Central, Loss Prevention Analytics and foodservice tools round out the line.
- It serves more than 5,000 retail locations, aimed at the single-site and small-chain end where 63% of US convenience stores sit.
- Data from a small operator carries more week-to-week variance, more bespoke category structure and more pricebook drift than a large-chain export.
Sources: Petrosoft, "About Us"; NACS 2026 store count.