E-Ticketing vs Paper Tickets: What a Paper Ticket Costs

Take 12 trucks running 5 loads a day each for 250 working days. That is 60 paper tickets a day and 15,000 a year. Those inputs are an illustration, and every figure below scales directly with your own truck count, loads per day, and working days.

What is e-ticketing

FHWA defines e-ticketing as the recording and transfer of material delivery information in real time as material moves from the plant to the job site [1]. The ticket is created electronically and sent as data: material type, quantities, and delivery information go to a cloud database that multiple users can open immediately [1].

A photo of the paper ticket, taken in a driver app at the scale, gets the ticket to the office the same day, but public agencies treat it differently. FHWA’s guidance is that paper tickets have served as source documents, the records of completed quantities that partial payments to contractors are approved against, and that photographs and scans of them did not [5]. FHWA counts e-tickets as source documents because they are created, transmitted, and stored electronically with a chain of custody [5]. South Carolina DOT’s asphalt specification, approved in July 2025, requires a live connection from the plant’s ticketing system to the agency’s portal, either direct or through a third-party e-ticketing provider’s API [2].

Handling time

FHWA’s e-ticketing briefing traces a paper ticket through the supplier, the driver, the hauler, and the contractor or inspector, and through four processing steps: collected, data captured, data re-keyed, and reconciled [3]. FHWA’s implementation plan adds that agencies and the private sector both spend considerable resources producing, sorting, recording, and archiving paper tickets [1].

Agencies have estimated their share of that work. In a 2023 survey of 53 highway construction professionals, most of them state DOT staff, 28% said scanning a day’s batch of paper tickets took 30 to 60 minutes and 21% said it took 1 to 2 hours, and respondents expected e-tickets to save each inspector 30 to 90 minutes a day [4].

For your own office, time 20 tickets from the moment they come off the truck to the moment each one is on an invoice line, and take the average. On the illustrative operation:

• Every minute of handling per ticket is 60 minutes of office time a day on 60 tickets
• Over 250 working days, that is 250 hours a year for each minute a ticket takes
• 250 hours is 12% of a 2,080-hour work year (40 hours × 52 weeks)

FHWA’s plan says e-ticketing eliminates manual or multiple data entries [1]. What stays with the office is checking the tickets that do not match their loads.

Lost tickets

FHWA’s implementation plan says lost or damaged paper tickets are common, without putting a rate on it, and that e-ticketing eliminates them [1]. On public work a load without its ticket has no source document behind its payment [5], and South Carolina’s specification says a load delivered without a corresponding e-ticket may be rejected [2].

Price a missing ticket at the material on the truck. USGS puts the estimated 2025 average unit value of U.S. crushed stone at $18.50 per metric ton [6], which is about $16.78 per short ton, so a 20-ton load (an illustration) carries about $336 of stone before any delivery charge. On 15,000 loads a year, every 1 ticket in 1,000 that never reaches billing is 15 loads and about $5,000 of stone. A hauler loses the haul charge on those loads instead.

To find your own rate, count one month of loads dispatched against tickets that reached billing, and price the difference.

Invoice lag

The customer’s payment terms cannot start until the invoice goes out, and the invoice cannot go out until the ticket reaches billing. On the illustrative operation, one day’s deliveries are 60 loads at $336, about $20,100 of stone. Each working day between delivery and invoice keeps another day of deliveries uninvoiced, so a 5-working-day lag (an illustration) holds about $100,700 at any time. Carried on a credit line at the 7.00% bank prime rate the Federal Reserve reported for September 24, 2026 [7], that balance costs about $7,000 a year in interest before any margin your lender adds. Measure your own lag from last month’s invoices: invoice date minus delivery date, averaged across loads.

An e-ticket reaches the office within minutes of the load. FHWA’s write-up of a 2022 peer exchange records that Iowa DOT requires the plant to transmit each ticket before the truck leaves, with any update within 5 minutes of a change [5], and South Carolina’s specification lets the agency reject a load whose e-ticket reaches its portal more than 10 minutes after creation [2]. FHWA’s stated time benefit is shorter processing for quality assurance and payment [8]. With the ticket in billing the day the load delivers, the invoice can go out that day.

Public work

On a public job the spec sets what counts as a ticket. South Carolina’s lists 16 required fields, including ticket number, weighmaster, truck ID, ticketed time, and gross, tare, and net weight to 0.01 tons, and pays nothing extra for the system, because its cost is incidental to the material [2]. FHWA reported that Delaware DOT made e-ticketing a requirement on all asphalt paving projects in spring 2022 [9]. A producer that already sends e-tickets to an agency portal has the data to send private customers the same ticket instead of paper.

Replacing paper

Treat the ticket as data from the moment the truck is weighed: an e-ticket feed from the scale system where the producer has one, and a photo in the driver’s app before the truck pulls away where it does not. Then stop accepting paper at the billing desk, because each paper ticket that still arrives is one someone keys and matches by hand. Tread takes tickets from a scale-house integration, the driver app, or a photo texted to Tread, and links each one to its load, job, and order [10]. When a load finishes without its ticket, Tread texts the driver and attaches the photo they reply with to that load, without a dispatcher calling anyone [11]. Tread turns that feature on per account [11].

Sources

1. FHWA, e-Ticketing Implementation Plan (FHWA-HRT-22-045), December 2021. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructure/pavements/22045/22045.pdf
2. South Carolina DOT, Supplemental Technical Specification SC-M-409 (07/25), Electronic Material Ticket (E-Ticket) for Asphalt Paving, FHWA approved July 7, 2025. https://www.scdot.org/content/dam/scdot-legacy/business/technicalpdfs/supspecs/SC-M-409%20Electronic%20Ticket%20Delivery%20System%20for%20Asphalt%20Paving%20(07-25)%20%20FHWA%20Approved.pdf
3. FHWA, What is e-Ticketing? (slides citing Iowa DOT and the Iowa ready-mix concrete association), September 2020. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/econstruction/what_is_e_ticketing.pdf
4. Subramanya, Kermanshachi, Pamidimukkala, and Loganathan, An assessment of the impacts of electronic ticketing on inspections and material procurement for highway construction, Frontiers in Built Environment, May 30, 2023. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/built-environment/articles/10.3389/fbuil.2023.1182609/full
5. FHWA, Tech Brief FHWA-HIF-24-068, North Dakota DOT e-Ticketing Peer Exchange (March 2022). https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/econstruction/hif24068.pdf
6. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, Stone (Crushed). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-stone-crushed.pdf
7. Federal Reserve, H.15 Selected Interest Rates, release of September 25, 2026. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/
8. FHWA, EDC-6: e-Ticketing and Digital As-Builts (page last modified May 13, 2024). https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/innovation/everydaycounts/edc_6/eticketing.cfm
9. FHWA, Tech Brief FHWA-HIF-24-056, Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority e-Ticketing Peer Exchange (June 2022). https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/econstruction/hif24056.pdf
10. Tread Docs, Tickets and Timesheets. https://docs.tread.ai/concepts/tickets-timesheets
11. Tread Docs, AI Ticket Chaser. https://docs.tread.ai/specialized/ai-ticket-chaser