If you buy aggregate at the pit and sell it delivered, reconciliation is the most expensive job in the office that doesn't look like one. It's not a bill to pay. It's a story to verify: did every tonne the quarry charged us actually leave the pit, land on a job, and get billed to a client?
This post is about how that story gets told — badly on paper, and properly when the docket is the record.
Where the tonnes go
There are four ways a month-end gap shows up, and only one of them is theft:
- Transcription drift. The weight is written down at the pit, re-read at the office, typed into a spreadsheet, then re-typed into an invoice. Each pass is a chance to lose a decimal or swap two digits.
- Lost tickets. A docket that never makes it out of the glovebox is a load you paid for at the pit and never billed anyone for.
- Timing cuts. The quarry's invoice cuts at a different date than your billing week, so 40 tonnes legitimately falls on the wrong side of the ledger.
- Plain errors. Wrong product code, wrong truck, wrong rate — on either side.
The expensive part is that every one of these looks identical on a spreadsheet: a row that doesn't match.
Why the docket number is the key
Reconciliation only works if both sides reference the same thing. The quarry's invoice references docket numbers and gross weights. Your records reference the same dockets — if the driver photographed them at the tailgate. When both sides are keyed on the same docket, matching is mechanical: docket number plus weight, line by line.
A load record isn't complete until it has the docket number, the weight, the product, the truck, the GPS stamp and the photo. That's the whole story of the load, and reconciliation is just checking the quarry's version against it.
What the match actually proves
- Every billed tonne has a docket. If the quarry charges you for a docket you don't have, you don't pay for it.
- Every docket has a billed client. If a load left the pit and never appeared on an invoice, that's margin you can chase — or a driver you need to talk to.
- Weights agree. A 0.5 tonne drift across 200 loads a month is real money at the year's end.
That last one is why reconciliation belongs in the system, not in a spreadsheet session on a Friday afternoon. A spreadsheet can total a column. It can't tell you that docket 20481 is missing from the client run, or that the quarry billed you twice for the same day's pit sheet.
How Cartage Core does it
Supplier reconciliation in Cartage Core matches each line of the supplier's bill to individual loads by docket number and weight. Unmatched lines surface as a list — overbilled dockets, missing dockets, weight mismatches — and each one links back to the load record with its photo. What used to take an afternoon becomes a review of a short list.
And because the same load record drives the client invoice, the other half of the story is already told: if the load was captured, it was billed. The only gap left is the one the system can't close for you — the driver who didn't photograph the docket. That's a conversation, not a spreadsheet.
The takeaway
Reconciliation isn't about being pedantic with the quarry. It's about making sure the load record is the single version of the truth — and then holding every bill and every invoice up against it. When the docket photo is the record, the month end stops being archaeology.
