Trailers going three ways at once
At harvest, you combine and cart for several farms. On one farm, trailers take grain to the farm's own store. On another, some goes into the store and some goes straight to a merchant's intake, where a weighbridge ticket is issued. A third customer has grain carted to a central store shared with other farms. Your trailer drivers keep up with the combine, drive to wherever they are sent, and bring back a ticket if one was issued.
At the end of the week, there is a pile of weighbridge tickets on the dashboard of the trailer tractor, a few in the office, and one lost. Your customer asks how much went to the merchant. You bill for carting per load, per hour or per tonne, and nobody has a clear count.
Why carting records go astray
Carting is fast and repetitive, and records compete with keeping up with the combine.
- Loads go to different destinations for the same customer.
- Weighbridge tickets are paper, and some are left in cabs or lost.
- Farm store loads have no ticket at all, only a trailer count.
- Several customers' grain may be carted in the same week by the same drivers.
- Charging may be per load, per tonne or per hour, depending on the customer.
Your customers need the records too. Their grain store records and their sales records depend on knowing how much went where.
Rejections and redirections add to the muddle. A load turned away at a merchant's intake for moisture comes back to the farm store, or goes to a drier elsewhere, and the ticket, if there is one, shows a rejection rather than a weight. A load sent to the wrong store because the driver misheard the instruction has to be traced later. On a busy day these are not rare, and each one breaks the neat count of loads out and tickets back.
What lost loads cost
If you charge per load or per tonne, every uncounted load is income lost. If you charge per hour, missing records make the hours harder to justify. And a customer who cannot reconcile your carting with their own figures will query your bill.
There is a customer-service cost too. A customer who has to ask you for tickets, and wait while you find them, is a customer who notices. A contractor who hands over a clean list of loads, destinations and weights is one they will book again.
A load log for every trailer
What we build is a load log that trailer drivers fill in with a tap, with weighbridge tickets captured by photo.
- At the start of each field, the combine operator or trailer driver picks the customer and field on a phone.
- Each time a trailer leaves the combine, the driver taps 'load', picks the destination from a short list for that customer (farm store, merchant, central store), and drives off.
- At a weighbridge, the driver photographs the ticket. The ticket number, weight and date are read from the photo and matched to the load.
- Farm store loads are recorded with an estimated weight per trailer, which you set, or a weight from the customer's own weighbridge if they share it.
- Loads are totalled per customer, field and destination, and priced by your rate for that customer.
- The customer gets a load list with destinations, ticket numbers and weights, for their own records.
| Destination | What is recorded | Weight source |
|---|---|---|
| Farm store | Load, field, time | Estimated per trailer, or customer's weighbridge |
| Merchant intake | Load, field, ticket photo | Merchant's ticket |
| Central store | Load, field, ticket photo if issued | Store's ticket, or estimate |
A clean load list at the end of harvest
During harvest, the office checks the log each evening rather than at the end. Loads with no ticket where one was expected show up the same day, while the driver still remembers, and a rejected load is recorded with its new destination instead of disappearing from the count.
At the end of harvest, each customer's load list is ready: loads per field, destinations, and weighbridge tickets matched to loads. One ticket is missing; the log shows which load it was, the time and the merchant, so the driver checks his cab and finds it. The invoice uses the load count for customers charged per load, and the weights for those charged per tonne.
The customers forward the lists to their own grain records.
Is your carting recorded like this?
- Weighbridge tickets pile up in cabs and some get lost.
- Farm store loads are counted loosely or not at all.
- Customers ask you for carting records and tickets.
- You are not sure how many loads went where.
- Carting charges are based on estimates.