Material-haul OCR: scale tickets to GL in one pass
A field-tested pattern from aggregate and concrete operations: how RQ CloudOCR turns scale tickets and bills of lading into clean AR and inventory data.
Aggregate and concrete operations live and die on tickets. Every truck, every load, every haul produces paper, and every piece of paper has to land in AR, inventory, and (eventually) the GL. Here's the pattern that works in the field.
The shape of the document
Scale ticket, BOL, and delivery ticket all share a structure: ticket number, date, customer, job, material, gross/tare/net weight, signatures. RQ CloudOCR is trained against that structure rather than against a specific template, which matters because scale-house printers are wildly inconsistent.
Capture at the scale house
Phone or tablet at the scale house, photograph as the truck leaves. RQ CloudOCR extracts the fields before the truck reaches the highway. Operator confirms or corrects on the same screen. The hauler's name and the customer's name are usually the highest-variance fields; everything else extracts cleanly.
Posting to AR and inventory
- Net weight × material price → invoice line on the customer's open AR cycle.
- Net weight → inventory drawdown on the source pit or plant.
- Ticket image attached to both records so audit can trace either direction.
Where the operational win lives
Disputes. With the ticket image attached to the invoice in the AR portal, the customer dispute conversation ends before it starts. The single most expensive thing in materials AR is a 30-day-old dispute about a load nobody can find; that conversation disappears.