Concrete Pour Record and Delivery Ticket Log

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How to use this tool

Set the header and the specification before the first truck arrives, because once concrete is discharging you will not have time. Ordered volume comes off the delivery docket. Theoretical volume is the design volume of the element you are placing, and it is what the waste figure is measured against, so it is worth having from the takeoff rather than guessing.

Then log each truck as it goes. The four time fields are batched, arrived, discharge start and discharge finish. Batched is the one people skip and it is the one that matters most, because the elapsed clock runs from batching, not from arrival. It is printed on the ticket. Copy it across.

Slump, air and temperature only get checked if you have entered a range for them. Leave any of those blank and the value is still recorded on the report but not judged, which is what you want when the specification is silent on it. The same applies to the time limit: it defaults to 90 minutes because that is the common requirement, but it is an input, so set it to whatever your specification or your approved mix actually allows.

Cylinder identifiers belong on the ticket row they were cast from, not in a separate list. When a break comes back low at 28 days, the first question is which load it came from, and this is the only place that link survives.

What the tool is calculating

Elapsed time is measured from the batch time to the end of discharge, in minutes, rolling over correctly if the pour runs past midnight. Anything above your limit is flagged red. The tool also splits out how long each truck waited between arriving and starting to discharge, and how long the discharge itself took, because those two numbers tell you whether the delay was the plant, the road or your own placing crew.

Delivered volume is the sum of the ticket volumes. Against order is delivered minus what you ordered, carrying its sign. Waste is delivered minus theoretical, as a percentage of theoretical, which is the figure that actually tells you something: ordering thirty and receiving thirty is not waste if the element only ever needed twenty five.

Placement rate is the delivered volume divided by the pour window in hours. If you have entered a pour start and finish it uses those, and if you have not it works the window out from your earliest discharge start to your latest discharge finish. Slump, air and temperature are averaged across all loads that reported them, and each load is checked against its range inclusively, so a value sitting exactly on the limit passes.

Why the clock starts at batching and not at the gate

This is the single most misunderstood number on a concrete site, and it is misunderstood in a way that consistently favours nobody.

Hydration begins when water meets cement, in the drum, at the plant. Everything after that is the concrete using up the working life it was mixed with. The limit that specifications place on discharge, commonly 90 minutes, is measured from that moment, not from when the truck reaches your gate and certainly not from when it starts discharging. A load batched at 8:35 that finishes discharging at 10:10 has used 95 minutes regardless of how long it spent on your site.

Here is the sequence that catches people. A truck leaves the plant, hits traffic, and arrives 70 minutes after batching. It then waits 25 minutes because the pump is being repositioned. By the time it finishes discharging it is at 100 minutes. On site nobody notices anything unusual, because from where the crew is standing the truck arrived and it discharged, and it was only on site for half an hour. The batch time is sitting on a docket in the cab.

What makes it expensive is what happens next. Concrete that far into its working life has stiffened, so somebody adds water at the chute to get it moving. That raises the water to cement ratio, and the water to cement ratio is the single biggest determinant of strength. Twenty eight days later the cylinder from that load breaks below the specified strength, and the argument starts about why. Without a record showing the batch time, the elapsed time and the water added, that argument has no factual anchor and it usually resolves against whoever has the weaker paperwork.

The limit is also not a cliff edge. Concrete does not turn to gravel at 91 minutes. That is exactly why it needs recording rather than policing: the useful output is a record showing which loads ran long and by how much, so that if a strength result comes back low there is a documented reason to look at, and if it does not, there is documented evidence that the loads were placed inside their window.

Note that the requirement is usually expressed with an alternative, either the elapsed time or a number of drum revolutions, whichever comes first, and it can often be extended by agreement where the concrete is still workable without adding water. Agencies word this differently, which is why the limit on this tool is a field you set rather than a number baked in.

A worked check you can repeat on paper

Press Load example pour. It sets four trucks against a 30 cubic metre order, a theoretical volume of 28.5, a slump range of 60 to 100 mm, air of 5 to 8 percent, temperature of 10 to 30 degrees, and the standard 90 minute limit.

Ticket one was batched at 8:05 am and finished discharging at 9:15 am. That is 70 minutes, comfortably inside the limit. Slump 80, air 6.2, temperature 21, all within range, so it passes on every check.

Ticket two is the interesting one. Batched 8:35 am, finished discharging 10:10 am, which is 95 minutes. It fails the elapsed check by five minutes. Look at the breakdown and you can see where it went: it arrived at 9:20, so 45 minutes were spent getting here, then it sat for 25 minutes before discharge started at 9:45, and discharge itself took 25 minutes. The site cost it 50 of those 95 minutes. It also carries 10 litres of water added, which is not a coincidence.

Ticket three ran 9:30 to 10:45, so 75 minutes, fine on time. It fails on slump instead, at 110 against a maximum of 100. Ticket four ran 70 minutes and passes on time and slump but fails on air at 4.2 against a minimum of 5, which on anything exposed to freeze and thaw is the more serious of the two.

The totals: 7.5 plus 7.5 plus 7.5 plus 6.0 gives 28.5 cubic metres delivered. That is 1.5 short of the 30 ordered and exactly equal to the theoretical, so waste comes out at zero percent. Mean slump is 83.8, mean air 5.7, mean temperature 22.5. Average elapsed time is 77.5 minutes with the longest at 95. The pour window runs from the first discharge start at 8:50 to the last discharge finish at 11:30, which is 160 minutes or 2.67 hours, giving a placement rate of 10.69 cubic metres per hour.

Every one of those figures was checked against an independent implementation before publishing. The two versions were run against each other on four thousand generated pours plus an exhaustive sweep of every hour and minute in both twelve and twenty four hour notation, covering blank fields, malformed times, missing specification ranges and pours crossing midnight. They agreed on all of it.

Mistakes that catch people out

Recording arrival time instead of batch time. This is the mistake the whole tool exists to prevent. Arrival tells you about the road. Batch time tells you about the concrete. If you only capture one, capture the batch time.

Not logging water added at the chute. Adding water is sometimes legitimate and sometimes permitted up to the design water content, but it is never something you want to be reconstructing from memory after a low break. Write the amount on the ticket row and note who authorised it in the daily report.

Treating air content as less important than slump. Slump is visible and everyone watches it. Air is invisible and it is the one that determines whether the concrete survives twenty winters. A load at 4.2 percent when the specification says 5 to 8 is a durability problem that will not show up in a cylinder break at all.

Confusing ordered with theoretical. Waste measured against what you ordered is circular, because you chose the order quantity. Waste measured against the design volume of the element is the number that tells you whether the forms were bigger than the drawing, whether there was overbreak, or whether you are consistently over ordering.

Losing which cylinder came from which truck. A set of cylinders with no load reference is nearly useless when one breaks low, because you cannot tie the result back to an elapsed time, a slump or a water addition. It takes four characters in the cylinder column.

Filling the log in afterwards. A pour record assembled that evening from a pile of dockets loses the two things it exists to capture, which are the on site waiting times and the additions at the chute. Neither is written on the docket. Fill it in as the trucks go.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Concrete Test Age Calculator, to work out the 7 and 28 day break dates for the cylinder sets you logged against each load.
• Concrete Mix Volume and Quantity Estimator, for the theoretical volume that the waste figure on this report is measured against.
• Concrete Yield reference, covering why delivered volume and batched volume are not always the same number.
• Slump Test method reference, for how the slump values on this log are actually measured.
• Cylinder Compressive Strength method reference, for what happens to those cylinder sets once they leave site.
• Daily Work Report Generator, to record the pour alongside the crew, equipment and delays for the same day.
• Field Density Test Report Generator, for the compaction record on the fill the element is founded on.
• CSA Group, publisher of A23.1 and A23.2, which govern ready mixed concrete and its field testing in Canada.