Every roll-off company has a drawer of scale tickets. Some of them have been billed. Nobody is completely sure which. A scale ticket is a receipt for money you spent at the landfill and a basis for money you are owed by the customer, and between the scale house and the office it rides in a cab, a glovebox and sometimes a pocket. The leak is not the landfill; it is the gap between the ticket and the invoice.
What a scale ticket says
Gross weight: the truck, the container and the load, in. Tare: the truck and the empty container, out, or a stored tare for the truck. Net: the load. A site name, a material, a date and a ticket number. Sometimes the site's charge. The net is the number you bill, in pounds, which you convert to short tons by dividing by 2,000. A 6,440-pound net is 3.22 tons.
A ticket that prints weights in tons already is rare but it happens, and a "ton" over about a hundred is a mislabeled pounds figure. Sanity-check the number before it lands on an invoice: a 20-yard box does not hold 60 tons.
The leak, and the fix
The leak is retyping. The driver photographs the ticket, or does not; the office types the net into the job, or types the gross by mistake, or rounds 3.22 to 3; the invoice goes out at 3 tons; the drawer gets another ticket. Every step loses a little.
The fix is to make the photo the record. At the landfill, before the truck moves, the driver photographs the ticket in the app on the job it belongs to. The app reads the gross, tare and net, matches the site name to the disposal site on file (a transfer station is not a landfill, and the reader should not confuse "Rockford Transfer Station" with "Rockford Landfill"), converts to tons and fills in the weight. The driver checks the hint against the paper and taps Save. The office never types a weight. The ticket number goes on the invoice line, so the customer can see which ticket a charge came from.
What the disposal line should say
For a per-ton rental: the date, the disposal site, the tons at the customer's rate, and the ticket number. "Disposal, Oct 14, Lorain County Landfill, 3.22 t at $63.25/t, ticket 48812." Quantity one, with the tons shown as a measured quantity, so the line reads as tons times rate rather than a rounded count. The landfill's own cost belongs on the job for your margin report, never on the customer's description.
If the rental is on included tons, the line is the overage only: tons over the allowance at the overage rate, with the same ticket reference. The pricing post explains the two models.
Hold the final until the tickets are in
A rental's final invoice is the container, the days and every pull's disposal. A pull whose ticket has not come back is a disposal line that cannot be priced. The wrong answer is a placeholder at the general rate; the right answer is a final that refuses to issue, lists the pulls still waiting on a weight, and lets the office issue anyway if they decide to. The same goes for a pull whose disposal site is not set, because without the site there is no rate.
Your disposal costs, in one report
Once every pull has a ticket, you have the landfill cost per job next to what you billed for it, and a dumps-and-tonnage report falls out: pulls by disposal site, tons, cost, billed, and the net on the pulls that have a cost. A pull with no cost yet should say so, not read as zero, because "zero cost" and "cost unknown" lead to opposite decisions about your pricing.
The ticket is proof, too
A customer who disputes a 4-ton overage charge gets the photo of the ticket with their container number and the landfill's stamp on it. That conversation is over in one email. It is the dumpster version of the stamped service photo.
