Contractor haulage statements: from manual counts to sealed cycles

Where money leaks in manual counting

In haulage projects — quarry to pour site, loading station to landfill — the statement is usually built from three sources: a slip signed by the gate guard at each entry, a notebook kept by the site supervisor, and whatever the driver reports at the end of the day. All three are human, and each errs in a different direction: a trip that ran but was never logged, a trip logged twice, a slip lost in the cab, an unreadable signature, a quantity column filled in by estimate.

Anyone who has worked in the sector knows the result. Month-end becomes reconciliation sessions between ledgers that do not agree; "settlement" deductions the truck owner grudgingly accepts so he gets paid something rather than everything being delayed; and a contractor–owner relationship corroded by suspicion on both sides. The deeper loss is that the contractor himself only learns the true transport cost of each project line item late — after the next round of pricing decisions has already been made on approximate numbers.

The problem compounds with scale. A single project can run dozens of trucks belonging to several owners, across multiple loading and dumping sites, on shifts that start before sunrise and end after dark. Every additional truck adds paperwork, every additional site adds a gate guard, and every night shift adds a blind spot no supervisor sees. Manual counting that "gets by" at five trucks collapses at fifty — not because people got worse, but because the system was never designed for that volume.

Automatic counting from geofences: how it works

The core idea is simple. Loading and unloading sites are drawn as geofences on the map — a circle around the quarry, a polygon on the project site boundary, or a corridor along a specific road — and the platform watches every truck's entry, exit, and dwell time. A completed trip is defined as a clear rule: entry into a loading zone, sufficient dwell to load, exit, then entry into the matching unloading zone. When the rule is satisfied, a trip is recorded against the relevant contract automatically — no paper, no signature, no human judgment.

Because every trip is backed by an actual position log with entry and exit timestamps, any objection can be settled by pulling up that very trip and replaying its route on the map with speed coloring — resolving the dispute by watching what actually happened rather than comparing memories. The three geofence types and their entry, exit, and dwell events are covered on the live tracking page.

The quality of the count comes from the quality of the drawing and the rules. The dwell threshold is tuned so a queue outside the quarry gate is not counted as loading, and passing traffic on the public road is not counted as entry; a corridor is used where sticking to a specific route is part of the agreement, so any deviation is flagged automatically; and polygon boundaries are drawn on the site's actual fence, not a theoretical estimate. An hour spent tuning these details at setup saves months of argument afterwards.

On the Pixa platform, all of this runs inside an integrated contracting module: projects branch into contracts, each contract carries its tariff model and its geofenced sites, and counts flow from geofence events straight into the contract until the statement is issued. A fuller view is on the contracting page.

Tariff models: per trip or per cubic meter

Haulage contracts are usually priced one of two ways: an amount per trip, or an amount per cubic meter moved. The choice is not an accounting detail — it determines what must be measured, what can be disputed, and who carries the risk of partial loads:

Both models are supported at the level of an individual contract, and a single project can hold contracts on different models for different transport suppliers — while the source of the count stays identical in both cases: the same geofence rule. The golden rule: write the model and its parameters into the paper contract in the very wording defined in the system — body capacity, dwell threshold, approved zones — so no gap remains between the two documents for a dispute to slip through.

Sealed cycles: why nothing is recalculated

A number that can be edited later is not a number a financial commitment can rest on. That is why the accounting is organized in cycles: a cycle opens, automatically counted trips accumulate inside it, and at its end it is reviewed, then closed and sealed. After issuance it is never recalculated — no retroactive tariff edits, no late trips inserted, no rows deleted "by mistake". Anything that surfaces after closing rolls transparently into the next cycle.

The seal is not a formality; it is a mutual guarantee. The truck owner knows the statement issued to him will not shift under his feet two weeks later; the contractor knows the transport cost he closed a project line item on is genuinely final; and the financial auditor finds a complete chain traceable from the first trip to the statement line. The platform adds one more layer: a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit log across the whole system, so history cannot be silently erased or rewritten regardless of privilege level.

The cycle policy itself is fixed in the contract, not left to custom: its length — weekly or monthly — the review date before closing, and who on each side approves the seal. Short cycles surface differences early and keep any potential dispute small before it compounds; longer cycles lighten the review burden and suit stable projects. What matters is that the length never remains a verbal understanding that changes when the people do.

The statement and the truck owner's window

When a cycle closes, the statement is issued in PDF and Excel, itemized by trips, dates, contracts, and tariffs — part of a reporting suite of 29 ready reports (17 vehicle-level and 12 organization-level) in Arabic and English, in both Hijri and Gregorian calendars, produced by a PDF engine with native RTL support rather than a patched-on one. For a contractor whose official paperwork runs on the Hijri calendar, reports issued directly with Hijri dates remove the manual conversion tables that were themselves a source of errors. The full suite is on the reports page.

More important for the relationship: the truck owner gets his own window where he watches his trucks' trips as they happen — not at month-end, when he is handed a finished number to either believe or fight. When both parties see the same figures at the same time, the dispute loses its material before it forms; whoever spots a missing trip objects that same day with the log in front of him, not a month later from memory.

The picture is completed by the rules engine and its 5 alert channels — WhatsApp, SMS, email, app push, and browser notification — delivering entry, exit, and abnormal-dwell events to the right people in the moment, so the working day is monitored as it runs rather than reconstructed afterwards. Engine details are on the alerts page.

Moving off the notebooks, step by step

The transition needs discipline, not heroics:

• Draw your sites: a geofence per loading and unloading site, with boundaries tight enough that passing traffic is never counted as dwell.
• Define your contracts: each with its tariff model — per trip or per cubic meter — its zones, and its parties.
• Run one cycle in parallel: keep the notebooks alongside automatic counting for a full cycle, reconcile the differences, and analyze their causes — they usually reveal how much was leaking all along.
• Adopt the sealed close: from the next cycle onward, the sealed statement is the single reference and the notebooks become a memory.

And bring the truck owners into the setup rather than presenting them with its result: show them the window, let them watch the reconciliation cycle themselves, and fix the agreed rules — zone boundaries, dwell thresholds, contractual capacities — in contract annexes. A party who helped set the rule does not litigate its outcome; a transition that starts with transparency ends in trust.

If the haulage statements in your projects are still built on paper and memory, contact us to see the contracting module on a real project's data — from drawing the zones to the first sealed statement.