Charles Freund
Chief Financial Officer at FLEETCOR Technologies
Yes. Thanks, Ron. So before digging into the financial results, I'd like to make sure that you were all aware of the new investor deck we posted on our website a few weeks ago. In there, we tried to simplify how we talk about the company. At its core, FLEETCOR provides a set of corporate payment solutions to help businesses reduce spend. Now we do it in two ways: one, by enabling and controlling what's purchased. We call this expense management, and it comes in a few flavors like fuel, tolls and lodging; Or two, by enabling controls after the purchase, but before the payments have been made. We call this AP payments where we provide the options businesses have to make their payments, such as online bill pay, full AP outsourcing, virtual cards and cross-border. So when you think of it this way, the company really does only two things: expense management and AP payments in a couple of different ways.
So with that context, let's look at some more detail on the quarter. As Ron mentioned, we posted an impressive 30% growth quarter, including 15% organic growth, which I'll get into in more detail in a moment. About 10% or $58 million of the growth was due to acquisitions we made last year and about 3% or $21 million came from macro tailwinds.
Speaking of macro, fuel prices were $3.88 per gallon for the quarter, higher than our $3.40 guidance assumption based on January levels. Higher fuel prices contributed about $22 million of additional revenues versus prior year.
Now we exited the quarter with fuel prices at around $4.50 per gallon. We do think this will moderate some over the balance of the year. Fuel spreads in the quarter had a positive impact of about $5 million, and we had a $6 million negative impact due to lower foreign exchange rates as unfavorable movements in European currencies, which affect our cross-border and fuel business, more than offset the strength of the Brazilian reals that helps our total revenue.
Now moving to organic growth, starting with AP payments. Our corporate payables were up 23%, and that was led by full AP outsourcing, which was up over 50% yet again, driven by continuing strong new sales. Cross-border was up 17%, and that's normalized for the AFEX acquisition. The cross-border team had a great quarter as new sales remain strong and activity recovered in Australia.
And moving on to our expense management solutions. Fuel was up organically 14% as new sales growth of 25% and higher same-store sales of 3% to 4% continued to drive the performance. I may sound like a broken record on this, but we continue to see fantastic results from our digital marketing and customer acquisition efforts across this business.
Tolls were up 18% compared with last year as the business just continues to perform. New sales are solid and retention initiatives are showing to be quite effective as we highlight the differentiated value proposition we offer versus our competitors.
Lodging continued to perform well, too, up 22%. Our workforce lodging business has improved with higher new sales and better volumes. Airlines again outperformed with organic growth over 65%. In the quarter, we did announce the purchase of Levarti, an airline software platform company. The deal is immaterial to our financials, but we believe the software, combined with our lodging solution will drive more sales in the airline vertical.
Now looking further down the income statement. Operating expenses of $472 million represented a 38% increase over prior year, primarily due to the addition of the AFEX and ALE operations, increases tied to higher volumes across our businesses, incremental bad debt stock compensation and new sales generation activities and investments to drive future growth.
Bad debt expense was $25.5 million or 6 basis points as bad debt levels have returned to more historical levels as customer spend increases with higher fuel prices and as a result of much stronger new sales, which tend to have a higher loss rate.
The EBITDA margin in the quarter was 50% as higher stock comp and bad debt expenses negatively impacted the margin. This was largely expected as the company took actions to stimulate growth coming out of the COVID environment. We still expect our full year EBITDA margin to be in line with our original expectations of 52% as margins expand throughout the year, along with revenue growth and the increased benefit of synergy realization from acquisitions.
Interest expense decreased 23% year-over-year, driven by the effect of a $1 billion fixed rate swap that matured in January and the benefit of higher interest income earned on customer deposits and cash balances in certain foreign jurisdictions. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 26% versus 22% last year with the increase driven primarily by less excess tax benefit on stock option exercises and higher interest income on foreign deposits, which are taxed at a higher rate.
Now turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with over $1.3 billion in unrestricted cash, and we had $969 million available on our revolver. There was $4.9 billion outstanding on our credit facilities and we had $1.4 billion borrowed in our securitization facility.
As of March 31, our leverage ratio was 2.72x trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA as calculated in accordance with our credit agreement.
In the quarter, we upsized our securitization facility to $1.6 billion in order to accommodate higher receivables balances due to higher fuel prices. We intend to maximize the use of the facility given that it is the lowest cost of capital funding instrument that we have.
We repurchased roughly 1.8 million shares, 1.1 million of which were completed under our 10b5 plan that we had in place in January, and which were included in our original guidance. We still have $1.23 billion authorized for repurchase and we believe we have ample liquidity to pursue any near-term M&A opportunities and continue to buy back shares when it makes sense.
Ron has covered our full year guidance updates. So now let me share some thoughts on our Q2 outlook and our assumptions.
For Q2, we're expecting revenue to be between $805 million and $825 million and adjusted net income per share to be between $3.80 and $3.90, which at the midpoint, is approximately $0.70 or 22% higher than what we reported in Q2 of 2021.
Regarding our guidance assumptions, we are using $3.90 as our fuel price assumption for the rest of the year. This reflects fuel prices of $4.25, $3.85 and $3.65 for the next three quarters, respectively. Clearly, we don't expect fuel prices to remain at the current elevated levels. So we're using this forward curve as the basis of our forecast.
Our interest expense guidance of $105 million to $115 million is based off of a LIBOR average of 154 basis points for April through December. Our original assumption had LIBOR of 54 basis points for that same period. The rest of our assumptions can be found in our press release and supplement.
I would note that our rest of year guidance expectations do still include revenue and adjusted earnings per share from our fuel business in Russia, which are $67 million and $0.63, respectively, for the remainder of the year.
Moving away from the results and outlook, I'd like to thank our circa 10,000 employees around the world who helped us deliver a fantastic start to 2022 and who will be the driving force as we continue to grow our company. Thank you for your interest in FLEETCOR.
And now operator, we'll open the line for questions.
