Truck tickets: four numbers for the same dirt, and only one of them pays you

Two of our trade pages say this out loud, and they say it better than a generic article would.

Our demolition page: Haul-off is a quarter of the contract and it is measured in tickets. And then the mechanism — unlike demo labor it is not a crew you control — it is pulls, scale tickets, tonnage and a hauler’s invoice that arrives weeks later.

Our excavation page names the actual trap: Who owns the spoil, who pays for import, and on what basis — truck loads, in-place cubic yards, bank measure or scale tickets. Those are four different numbers for the same dirt, and the pack asks you to settle them before the job starts for a reason. A sub who hauls 400 loads and gets paid on a bank-measure takeoff loses the difference without a single argument about quality.

That last sentence is the whole subject. You can perform the work perfectly, document it perfectly, and still lose money, because you counted in one unit and got paid in another. Nobody disputes anything. The difference just never shows up.

The four numbers, and why they disagree

They are measurements of the same material at different moments in its life, and the material changes volume on the way.

In-place, or bank measure. The quantity as it sits in the ground, calculated off the grading plan or a survey. This is what estimators and engineers work in, because it is the only number you can compute from a drawing before anything moves.

Loose or truck measure. The same material after a bucket has broken it up. Soil swells. Rock swells a lot. A cubic yard in the ground is more than a cubic yard in the bed, and the swell factor depends on the material, so the two numbers are not interchangeable with one constant you can remember.

Truck loads, or pulls. A count of trips. Simple to tally, and the easiest number for a foreman to produce honestly. Its weakness is that a load is only a quantity if the trucks are consistently sized and consistently filled, and on a busy site with three haulers they are neither.

Weight, from a scale ticket. What the disposal facility or the plant actually weighed. Typically gross minus tare, printed on a slip, timestamped, with a ticket number. What a ticket must show, and whether a certified scale is required, depends on your state and your contract. It is the most defensible of the four, and it is also the only one that is not yours — a third party generated it, which is exactly why it carries weight in an argument.

Compacted measure is sometimes a fifth, on import and on base course: the quantity after it is placed and rolled, which is less than the loose quantity you trucked in.

Each of these is a legitimate basis. None of them is wrong. The problem is only ever that two different ones are in play at once.

The basis is a contract term, not a field decision

The time to settle this is before the first truck. The excavation pack’s pre-construction review, one of the modules you switch on in Settings, carries it as an item: Confirm who owns spoil, import and haul-off, and the pricing basis.

What you want on paper, in plain words:

• The unit you bill in — tons, in-place cubic yards, loose cubic yards, loads.
• The source document that establishes the quantity — scale tickets, a surveyed cross-section, a load count signed by the GC’s superintendent.
• Who owns the spoil, and who pays the tip fee.
• What happens to unsuitable or contaminated material, which usually has a different unit price and almost always a different disposal cost.
• Whether import is a separate unit price or folded into grading.

Many subcontracts address some of this and are silent on the rest, and the measurement clause is often in a general-conditions attachment rather than in the scope. Your contract governs, and nothing here is legal advice. The practical point stands regardless: an unstated basis always resolves in favor of whoever is writing the check.

The three places the money actually leaks

One: you bill in one unit and get paid in another. The 400-loads-versus-bank-measure case. If your bid was built on truck loads and the GC’s quantity surveyor is paying on surveyed in-place yards, the swell is yours. It is a pure arithmetic loss with nobody at fault, and it is invisible unless somebody compares the two numbers on purpose.

Two: the disposal invoice lands after the draw. Our demolition page is precise about this one: Tonnage over the estimate is the quietest way a demo job loses money, because the overage lands as a disposal invoice against a line you already billed at the percentage the GC certified. The hauler’s invoice is weeks behind the work. You billed a percentage, the GC certified it, and then a cost you did not forecast arrives against a line that is already closed in everyone’s mind.

Three: a classification changes after the truck is loaded. Clean fill, soil with debris in it, contaminated material and demolition waste are often four different tip fees, and at many facilities the scale house decides which one you brought. Classification disputes get settled at the facility, in your absence, on a document you may not see for a month.

The reconciliation that catches all three

Four records have to agree, and the whole discipline is nothing more than making them agree every month instead of at closeout.

1. The field count. What your foreman recorded leaving the site that day — loads, with the unit and the material.
2. The scale tickets. The actual weights, with ticket numbers and timestamps.
3. The hauler’s invoice. What you are being charged, which is where the trucking and the tip fee may be bundled or separated.
4. The quantity you billed. What went on the draw.

Any gap between 1 and 2 is a load-size assumption that is wrong. Any gap between 2 and 3 is an invoicing error, and they are not rare. Any gap between 2 and 4 is either money you have not billed or money you will be giving back.

Do this monthly, in the same week you build the draw. Our demolition page names the failure mode of not doing it: Folded into the demo line, nothing tells you it went over until the job is closed.

Which points at the structural fix, and it belongs on the schedule of values rather than in a spreadsheet. The demolition pack opens Mobilization 10%, Demo 55%, Haul-Off 25%, Clean 10% — haul-off on its own line, because a quarter of the contract that behaves completely differently from the rest of it needs somewhere of its own to go. If you are deciding how to structure your SOV, that is the argument for a dedicated line. And if the quantity is the thing being paid for rather than a percentage of progress, read percent complete versus unit price first — a unit-price line is one whose quantity you have to be able to prove, every month.

What to actually do, on the day

A thermal slip in a truck cab is the most fragile important document on a construction site. It fades, it goes through a wash, and the driver who had it works for someone else.

Six things, in order of how much they are worth:

1. Count loads in the daily log the same day, with the material and the unit. A count made on the day is evidence. A count reconstructed in month three is an estimate with a confident tone.
2. Photograph every ticket that day. One photo, legible, while the slip is still clean. This is the single highest-value habit on a haul job.
3. Record the ticket number with the count, so a photograph and a line in the log can be matched later without guesswork.
4. Note the classification the facility assigned, not the one you expected.
5. Separate the trucking from the tip fee in your own records, because they are two costs with two different unit rates and the hauler may bundle them.
6. Reconcile monthly, against the invoice, before the draw goes out.

Also worth logging on a haul day: standby. A truck that waited, or a crew that stood while the site was blocked, is a cost with no scope attached to it, and it is only ever recoverable from a record made the day it happened.

What SubMark holds, and what it does not

The daily log carries a materials section, and it is built for exactly this entry. Each line records:

• a material name you type,
• a quantity,
• a unit you type — the field is free text, with the placeholder sheets, boxes, lbs, so tons, loads and CY all go in it without fighting a dropdown,
• one of four actions: delivered, used, returned or damaged,
• and an optional note.

So a haul day reads as one line per material and hauler: quantity 14, unit loads, and the ticket numbers and the facility’s classification in the note. None of the four actions says “hauled off”, so pick the one your crews will use for it and keep it consistent. One date, one job, one record, made by the person who watched the trucks leave.

Alongside it, photographs. Job photos upload in batches of up to 20 at a time, drag between category chips, and move in bulk when somebody files a set wrong. On dates: SubMark keeps the date the photo was taken where the file has one, and invents nothing where it does not. That matters more for a ticket photo than almost any other kind — the value of the image is that it was taken the day the truck left, and a camera’s own date is a stronger statement of that than an upload timestamp.

Now the limits, stated plainly so nothing here is a surprise in the app.

• There is no price field on a material line. The log records what moved, not what it cost. The dollar reconciliation happens in your accounting.
• There is no ticket-number field. The number goes in the note, which works, and the reason to standardize how your foremen write it is that a note is only as searchable as the convention behind it.
• There is no scale-ticket reading. Nothing extracts a weight from a photographed slip.
• There is no automatic reconciliation against a hauler’s invoice. The four-way comparison above is a person’s job, and SubMark’s contribution is that three of the four records are in one place with dates on them instead of in a glovebox, a shared drive and an email thread.
• SubMark has no cost codes — no library, no import, no mapping. Labor goes to the job, and to a phase only if phase tracking is switched on.

The reason this is worth a monthly hour

Every other trade can go back and measure the thing it is arguing about. You cannot. Our demolition page puts it in one line: Your evidence of extra work gets hauled away by the extra work.

A tonnage that left the site in April is not re-measurable in September. It exists in exactly as much detail as somebody wrote down at the time — and on a job where a quarter of the contract is measured in tickets, the writing down is not administration. It is the work.

See how the field side works, or what it costs.