If you’re managing earthworks projects using paper tickets, at a certain volume of loads, paper tracking stops being a viable system and starts becoming a liability. You can no longer keep up with the manual data entry, you’ve got invoices that don’t match your records, and your projects are at risk of losing money because things start slipping through the cracks.
This article covers the information you’ll need to know in order to switch from paper tickets to digital tracking, and what to look for in a software tool that will actually make your job easier, not more complicated.
Steps to go from paper tickets to digital load tracking:
Define the issue(s) you’re trying to solve:
- Understand and map out your current processes for inbound and outbound material tracking
- Identify what data matters to your business
- Evaluate types of tracking software: general construction ERPs vs fleet tracking software vs load tracking software
- Implement on a pilot project with a provider that supports your operations
The real problem with paper tickets
Paper tickets work fine when you’re moving a handful of loads a day. But tracking tickets, reconciling data, and verifying invoices becomes increasingly difficult as your volume increases.
Spending hours manually entering stacks of paperwork into spreadsheets
Every ticket from the field needs to be manually entered somewhere. At 50–100 loads a day across multiple sites, that’s a significant chunk of someone’s week spent doing repetitive, low-value tasks, and one of the easiest places for errors to occur.
Dealing with missing data from the field
Tickets get left in truck cabs, crumpled in jacket pockets, and never make it back to the office or if they do, they’re coffee-stained and illegible. By the time you’re reconciling at month-end, you’re working from an incomplete picture and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
Dealing with disputes over load counts with brokers or haulers
You get a bill for 47 loads. Your records show 45. Without having concrete data, you’re eating the cost. Missing data means you’re involuntarily financing another company’s operations.
Cost overruns because you can’t see what’s happening on site fast enough
Insights like cycle times, idle time, costs per cube, or cost per truck hour take time to calculate in spreadsheets (and again, require accurate data). If a hauler is underperforming or you’re moving more material than you budgeted for, you won’t know until it’s too late. If you’re using subcontracted trucks, this blind spot is one of the most expensive problems paper creates.
It just makes the whole operation run smoother."
Understand your current processes for inbound and outbound materials
Before transitioning to digital load tracking, you need to understand how you’re tracking material today and what paperwork is involved at each step. Most earthworks operations are managing some combination of the following ticket types:
Truck tickets
Issued per load or reconciled at the end of the day between the contractor and the trucking company, based on hours worked and/or loads hauled. Sometimes covers trucking only, sometimes trucking and disposal together, which changes how much load detail matters on the ticket itself.
Scale tickets (disposal)
Generated at a weigh scale when you’re disposing of material, recording tonnage per load. This is usually the trickiest reconciliation because the load is often also accompanied by a regulatory manifest or dump ticket, so you end up matching two or three sets of paperwork to get one true load cost.
Scale tickets (supply)
Generated when fill, aggregate, or sand is delivered to your site. The driver hands you a copy showing the quantity, which tells you what the supplier is going to invoice you for.
Dump tickets
Required by the receiving facility before they’ll accept a load. Sometimes the regulatory manifest doubles as the dump ticket. Other times it doesn’t, for example if a facility’s manifest rules only apply to contaminated material and you’re hauling non-impacted soil.
Regulatory manifests
Required by facilities for chain of custody, capturing source, material classification, and destination. A manifest can run anywhere from 15 fields to 55 or more depending on jurisdiction, and most of those fields repeat for every load on the same material stream and destination, which is exactly why this is one of the easiest places to automate. The driver needs a copy in case they’re pulled over, and the manifest may need sign-off from the generator, carrier, and receiver before the contractor gets a final signed copy back. Many contracts require these to be submitted to the contract administrator or project owner daily, which on paper means scanning and emailing a stack of manifests every single day.
Run sheets
A summary log of drivers on and off site, sometimes listing every load, start time, end time, and associated ticket. Think of it as the paper version of a daily production report.
Every load carries two components: the material itself (quantity, type, source, destination) and the tracking of that material (who moved it, when, and what it cost). Digital tracking’s real job is keeping those two components tied together automatically instead of leaving you to match tickets by hand.
What about material moved on-site?
Material moved within a site, is usually billed at a flat hourly rate rather than tracked per load, since there’s no off-site destination to reconcile against. It’s worth separating this rate from your off-site hauling rate so it doesn’t get blended into your load cost data.
Understanding which of these ticket types apply to your operation, and who owns each step, is the foundation of selecting a software that can follow your workflow.
What earthworks data actually matters to your business?
Before evaluating software, identify what data is important to your business. This is usually the data that you’re currently reporting on, built from spreadsheets and formulas.
Material & production data
- Load counts per day, per site, per truck
- Volume moved vs. budgets
- Cycle times and loads per truck hour
- Material type and classification
Accrued cost data
- Accrued costs of material supply/disposal and haulage
- Cost per load, cost per cube, cost per truck hour
- Hauler hours tracked vs. hours invoiced
Hauler performance
- Which haulers are hitting targets and which aren’t
- Idle time on site
- Load count discrepancies between your records and hauler invoices
Compliance and documentation
- Chain of custody records for material movement
- Source and destination of material by load
- Regulatory manifests where required
If you’re currently producing any version of a daily production report, a cost-to-complete update, or hauler reconciliation using spreadsheets, a good material tracking software will be able to generate these metrics automatically, without the time consuming data entry.
Other considerations before switching from paper tickets to material tracking
Do you own your fleet or subcontract?
If you subcontract any of your hauling, you need material tracking software, not GPS fleet software. Subcontracted drivers can’t be relied on to install a device for you.
How complicated are your operations?
It’s important to match your operations with a software tool that has the functionality you need but doesn’t make you to do more work than necessary. If you’re doing a lot of bulk excavation, there’s no point in an over-engineered workflow for what is ultimately a straightforward job: tracking loads from A to B.
Alternatively, if you have more complicated projects (contaminated material, multiple zones on site or phases to a project) a general construction ERP may not record enough load-level detail to be helpful to making operational decisions.
Construction ERPs vs Fleet Tracking Software vs Load Tracking Software: Which one do you need?
Once you’ve answered these questions it becomes easier to evaluate the right category of software. These three are the most common options contractors consider, and they serve very different purposes.
General construction ERPs
Platforms like Procore, Viewpoint, or HeavyJob are built to manage the full scope of a construction project (scheduling, subcontracts, RFIs, budgets, etc). They can capture load and volume data at a summary level, but they’re not designed for load-by-load data collection. If you need detailed haulage records, an ERP alone won’t get you there.
Fleet tracking software
GPS-based fleet tools are designed for companies that own their trucks. They track vehicle location, engine hours, and route data in real time, useful for managing a company-owned fleet. If you subcontract your hauling, this category doesn’t work well as brokered haulers won’t want to install a device for you. And even for companies that own their fleet, fleet tracking is focused on monitoring trucks, not so much the material and haulage data that drives project costs and data/invoice reconciliation.
Load tracking software
Purpose-built load tracking software allows you to collect both material and haulage data with very little input, captured by your field team at the point of dispatch and receiving, which means it doesn’t rely on the driver at all. This distinction matters: the field team controls the data collection, so the data is accurate regardless of which hauler shows up. It also means you get granular, per-load data that’s accessible automatically for hauler AP, cost tracking, and compliance reporting.
For earthworks contractors, especially those managing subcontracted haulage at any scale, material tracking software is the most practical fit.
What a good load tracking software should do
Not all load tracking tools are built the same. Here’s what to look for when evaluating options.
It should be easy to implement
Unless you have an extremely rigorous workflow or complex tech stack to integrate with, a good tracking tool doesn’t require weeks of setup, an IT department, or a consultant. You should be able to get set up in a single session and have your team tracking loads as early as the next day.
It should be flexible
Your software should be flexible enough to reflect how your operation actually runs. It should match your projects’ segments, budgets, and on-site workflows. You shouldn’t have to overhaul what you’re doing on site in order for the software to work.
It needs to be simple for the field team
The best tracking software in the world doesn’t work if the people on site won’t use it. If it’s more time consuming or complicated than using paper, there’s no point in using it. Low complexity = high adoption.
It shouldn’t rely on driver involvement
Especially if you subcontract your hauling, you have limited control over what a driver does with their paperwork. Good material tracking software puts the control in your field team’s hands. The site team owns the data: creating it, confirming loads, and ensuring hauler hours are agreed upon at the end of the day.
It should give you real-time visibility
End-of-week or end-of-month reports aren’t that helpful for decision making. Your PM should be able to see load counts, accrued costs, and production rates in real time, not after the project is finished. Real-time data is what turns tracking data into an operational management tool.
It should create a complete and accurate audit trail
Every load should be timestamped and tied to a specific hauler, site, and material type. When an invoice dispute comes up, you need records you can be confident in.
Ongoing support should be part of the package
Being a software expert shouldn’t be your job responsibility. Look for a provider with a dedicated support team that your field staff can reach when something goes wrong, so you’re not the one fielding questions from the site.
Implementing SoilFLO: A common approach
Some companies choose to pilot digital tracking on a single site first, while the rest of the operation stays on paper. Once they’ve got it up and running and seeing the value of SoilFLO, cleaner records, fewer disputes, no missing tickets, they begin rolling it out on all of their sites.
The companies that struggle with software rollouts are usually the ones that picked a tool too complex for their operation, or a vendor that handed them a login and disappeared. The right provider treats implementation as the beginning of the relationship, not the end of the sale.
