Twenty-tonne loads, but how many?
On a new road and plot drives you are bringing in Type 1 sub-base, 6F2 for a haul road and pipe bedding for the drainage gang. Several quarries and merchants deliver. The drivers hand a ticket to whoever signs. At month end the invoices list dozens of tickets. Some tickets are on the cabin spike, some are in a pocket, some have gone.
Your contracts manager has a feeling the tonnes are high for the area laid, but has no way to prove it and no time to try.
Why tonnes cannot be checked
Aggregate deliveries are frequent and routine, so nobody treats the ticket as important. Tickets are paper, sites are wet and dusty, and the office never sees them until the invoice. Some deliveries go to the wrong site, or are ordered for one job and tipped at another. And nobody compares the tonnes delivered with the quantity the job should need.
- Weighbridge tickets are handed to whoever is nearest.
- Tickets go missing before they reach the office.
- Orders are placed by phone and not logged.
- Tipped loads are not recorded against an area of the job.
- Delivered tonnes are not compared with the quantity measured.
What unchecked aggregates cost
You pay for tonnes you cannot prove arrived at your site. Deliveries meant for one job are costed to another. Over-use from wasteful laying or thicker layers than designed goes unnoticed. And on jobs where extra sub-base is needed because of ground conditions, you have no clean record to support your claim to the main contractor.
The delivery log we build
- Orders are logged on a phone with supplier, material, tonnes, job and delivery date. The supplier gets the order in writing.
- Each arriving tipper is logged by photographing its weighbridge ticket. The ticket is read for ticket number, material, gross, tare and net tonnes, and vehicle.
- The person receiving the load taps where it was tipped, such as road sub-base, plot drives or drainage bedding.
- Tickets are matched to orders, and deliveries without an order, or orders without deliveries, are flagged.
- Supplier invoices are read and checked ticket by ticket. Tickets on the invoice that are not in the log are queried with the supplier.
- Tonnes delivered per area are compared with the quantity measured or designed for that area, and big differences are highlighted.
- Deliveries are costed to the job and activity in your job costing or accounts system.
| Check | Paper tickets | Delivery log |
|---|---|---|
| Did this ticket arrive at our site? | If the ticket survived | Photographed on arrival |
| Which part of the job used it? | Nobody knows | Tipped area recorded |
| Does the invoice match? | Ticket numbers compared by hand | Checked automatically |
| Are we using more than we should? | Not checked | Compared with measured quantity |
Tonnes you can account for
Every delivery has a photographed ticket, a job and an area. Invoices are checked before payment and queries have ticket numbers and photos attached. Your contracts manager can see where tonnes are going and whether layers are thicker than they should be. Extra stone needed because of ground conditions has a record the main contractor can follow.
Over a few jobs the log also shows which suppliers deliver short, which tickets arrive late, and how your delivered tonnes per square metre of road compare between sites and gangs. That is the kind of detail that makes a quarry account review a conversation based on your own figures.
Does this sound like your aggregate deliveries?
- Weighbridge tickets are lost before they reach the office.
- Quarry invoices are paid without checking every ticket.
- Deliveries are sometimes costed to the wrong job.
- You do not compare tonnes delivered with quantities laid.
- Extra sub-base for soft ground is hard to evidence.