Most crusher owners can tell you last month’s sales to the rupee and cannot tell you last month’s yield to the tonne. Crusher production reporting is the weakest register in the plant, because sales have an invoice behind them and production has only a supervisor’s memory.
That gap costs money quietly. If you do not know how much raw stone went into the plant, you cannot tell whether a bad month was caused by soft feed, a worn screen, longer breakdowns or material walking out of the yard.
This post sets out what to measure at each stage, from blast to finished aggregate: raw stone in, production by product, yield, closing stock, and why physical and book stock never agree. It ends with the weekly report an owner should be handed.
Crusher production reporting: the chain you measure
There are five points in a crusher where a quantity can be captured, and each one needs a different method.
- Blast or quarry face: stone broken, estimated from the blast design and face survey.
- Raw stone into the plant: boulders tipped at the primary, best measured by weighed tipper loads or counted loads of a known bucket size.
- Production by product: what comes off the screens, by size.
- Stock in the yard: stacks by product, measured physically.
- Dispatch: weighed on the weighbridge, product by product, with the slip carrying the material name.
Only the last is naturally accurate, because a customer is watching. Everything upstream needs a deliberate method that a supervisor can follow at six in the morning without a calculator.
Measuring raw stone in
Pick one method and use it for a year. A consistent imperfect measure is more useful than three accurate measures that change every quarter.
- Weighed feed: tippers crossing the weighbridge on the way in. Most accurate, and it also gives you a tare discipline for hired tippers.
- Counted loads: tipper trips multiplied by an agreed average load per vehicle, with the average re-checked by weighing a sample each month.
- Loader buckets: bucket counts into the primary hopper, converted at an agreed bucket weight. Rough, but better than nothing and it costs nothing.
Whichever you use, record it daily against the shift, the feed source and the running hours. The value comes from having the number next to production, not from the number itself.
Production by product
Record production the way you sell it: separate lines for 40mm, 20mm, 10mm or 12mm, M-sand and dust, plus any GSB, WMM or boulder you handle.
Use the standard sizes rather than local names. IS 383:2016, the Indian Standard for coarse and fine aggregates for concrete, lists nominal sizes of 10mm, 12.5mm, 16mm, 20mm and 40mm, covers naturally sourced, manufactured and recycled aggregate, and recognises crushed stone sand, which is what your M-sand is. Using the same names as your customer’s engineer removes an argument before it starts.
This is also a legal requirement rather than good practice. Rule 56 of the CGST Rules requires a registered person to keep a stock account of goods received and supplied, and a manufacturer to keep monthly production accounts showing quantitative details of the raw materials used and the goods manufactured, including waste and by-products. Dust is a by-product. It belongs in the record even when you give it away.
What to capture on each shift sheet
- Date, shift, plant and the supervisor’s name.
- Running hours, and breakdown hours with a one-line reason.
- Feed in, by the method you chose.
- Production by product.
- Diesel issued to the plant and to the loader, separately.
- Anything moved internally, such as dust used for site roads.
Yield, and what it can and cannot tell you
Yield is production divided by feed, product by product. Do not go looking for an industry figure to compare yourself against, because yield at a crusher depends on the rock, the crusher setting, the screen media and how wet the feed is. Published percentages from another plant will mislead you.
Build your own baseline instead. Take three clean months, work out your yield by product, and treat that as normal for your plant. After that the useful number is the movement: a drop in the 20mm share with a rise in dust usually means worn liners or a closed setting, and a drop across everything usually means feed or downtime.
Watch the loss line too. Feed in, less all products out, is your unaccounted quantity. It will never be zero, but it should be stable, and a month where it jumps is worth an hour of somebody’s time.
Why physical stock and book stock differ
Every crusher has this gap. The mistake is treating it as an accounting error to hide rather than an operating signal, which is what crusher production reporting is for.
| Cause | Which way it moves the gap | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Moisture in the stack after rain | Physical looks higher against a weighed book figure | Note the weather on the count sheet, count on a dry morning where possible |
| Stack measured by volume, book kept in tonnes | Either way | Fix one conversion basis per product and keep it for the year |
| Fines blown away or washed off | Physical lower | Expect it, and keep dust as its own product line |
| Spillage, carry-back on the belt, rehandling | Physical lower | Include in the loss line rather than adjusting the product |
| Material issued without a slip, such as for internal roads | Physical lower | Raise an internal issue note, even with no invoice |
| Wrong product selected on the weighbridge slip | One product up, another down | Restrict the product list on the slip and check swaps monthly |
| Weighbridge drift or a stale tare | Either way, and it grows | Keep verification current and re-tare regular vehicles |
A weighbridge is a legal instrument, not just a scale. The Legal Metrology Act, 2009 requires a weighing instrument used in a transaction to be verified before use, so keep that verification current. We have written separately about the leakage points around the weighbridge.
The weekly report an owner should see
One page, same format, same day every week. If it takes more than ten minutes to read, it will not be read.
| Line | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Feed in, tonnes | Did the quarry keep the plant fed? |
| Production by product, tonnes | What did we actually make, and in what mix? |
| Running and breakdown hours | Were we down, and for what? |
| Dispatch by product, tonnes and value | What moved, and at what realisation? |
| Closing stock by product | What is standing in the yard, and is anything piling up? |
| Loss line | Feed less production, against the usual range |
| Royalty position | Quantity despatched against the sanctioned balance |
Keep the royalty line on the weekly sheet even though royalty is settled monthly. The sanctioned quantity is the one number in a quarry that cannot be caught up later.
A monthly stock discipline
- Count on the morning of the 1st, before the plant runs, product by product.
- Record measured, book and difference, with one line of explanation for each.
- Have the count signed by two people, one of whom is not the storekeeper.
- Reconcile dust and by-products as carefully as saleable product.
- Keep the quantity of mineral produced, in stock and despatched in the form your state rules require. In Karnataka, a quarry lease holder must keep those accounts and file a quarterly return in Form Q by the 8th of the succeeding month and an annual return in Form Y by 10 April.
- File the count sheet with the month, so an inspector or a buyer can be shown the working, not just the total.
If all of this is currently held in one large spreadsheet that only one person can open, it is worth reading our note on when spreadsheets stop working at a quarry.
Frequently asked questions
We do not weigh incoming raw stone. Where do we start?
Start with counted tipper loads and an agreed average per vehicle, then weigh a sample each month to correct the average. You will have a usable feed figure within a month and a reliable one within a quarter.
How do we value closing stock of dust that we sell cheap?
Valuation is a question for your CA and depends on your costing method. What matters here is that the quantity is recorded, because an unrecorded by-product is the easiest way for material to leave a yard unnoticed.
Should production be recorded by shift or by day?
By shift. A daily figure hides the difference between a good shift and a bad one, and the shift sheet is where a supervisor can still remember why the plant stopped.
Where this fits
Production reporting works when dispatch, stock and royalty come off the same record rather than three books. Quipu’s Stone Crusher and Quarry ERP takes gross, tare and net weight straight from the weighbridge into the dispatch log, records mineral-wise royalty on each dispatch with a running balance against the sanctioned quantity, and shows the plant position on a dashboard.
