The three days nobody accounts for.
Grain moves when the truck and the buyer’s schedule line up. Attribution — which of your open sales those bushels actually counted against — happens on paper, later, at the buyer’s pace.
Most of the time that is fine, because you only have one open sale to that buyer. But in the middle of a run you might have three, written on different days at different prices, and the settlement sheet is what tells you which one this truck filled. Until it lands, the bushels are physically gone from the bin and accounted for nowhere.
Why you cannot just guess.
- A guess produces a number that looks right. The contract shows 17,400 of 20,000 filled, and everyone believes it — including you — until the settlement says those bushels went against a different sale. Now two contracts are wrong instead of one.
- Leaving it off the books is wrong in the direction that hurts. Your position report says you are holding grain that left the yard on Tuesday. Sell against that number and you have oversold from a bin that is already empty.
- Reassignment is not a bookkeeping entry. Moving a load from one sale to another has to move the fulfilled counts on both and the site inventory with it. Done by hand, in two places, at the end of a long week, it is exactly the kind of thing that quietly does not happen.
- Once you have been paid, the record has to stop moving. A settled load that someone can still reassign is a dispute waiting to happen.
The bushels are gone. That part was never in question. The only open question is which contract they belong to.
How Horizon Grain handles it.
Sold Bushels has an Unapplied Hauls card pinned below your contract cards. Log the haul the day it leaves — bushels, haul number, trucker, destination, rate — exactly like any other haul, except you leave the contract blank.
Those bushels come out of your site inventory immediately, counted as delivered rather than sold. That distinction is the whole point: your position report is right the same afternoon, because the grain is correctly shown as gone, while no contract gets credit it has not earned. The card shows the running total per commodity, how many hauls are sitting unapplied, and how many of those are still unreconciled.
When the settlement arrives, open the haul and pick the contract. Each open sale in the list shows how many bushels it still has left to fill, so you can see at a glance where the load belongs. There is a Settlement # field for the number off the sheet while you have it in front of you. Assigning the haul recalculates both the contract’s fulfilled count and your site totals in one step — there is no second place to update.
Once you have actually been paid, check Reconciled. That locks the haul’s volume, its contract, and its delete. A settled load cannot be quietly moved to another sale, and the sale it belongs to cannot be deleted out from under it. Uncheck it if a genuine correction is needed.
Assignment and payment stay independent on purpose. A load can sit on a contract for weeks before the check clears, and deferred-payment loads may not settle until the following year.
How to use it: a quick walkthrough.
- Log the haul the day it ships. Sold Bushels → Unapplied Hauls → Add Haul. Enter bushels, haul number, trucker and destination as normal. Leave the contract off.
- Keep selling from a number you can trust. Those bushels are already out of your available inventory, so the position report reflects the empty bin, not the paperwork.
- Apply it when the settlement lands. View Hauls → edit the haul → pick the contract from the list, and record the settlement number off the sheet.
- Check Reconciled once you are paid. The load locks against volume changes, reassignment, and deletion.
- Watch the card empty out. An Unapplied Hauls card sitting at zero means every load that left your yard is accounted for against a contract.
Why this matters at small elevators.
The gap between the truck and the settlement sheet is not a small-elevator problem. It happens at every size, because it is the buyer’s paperwork, not yours.
What is different with two or three people is that there is nowhere to park the number in the meantime. There is no separate desk holding a list of loads waiting on settlements, so the load either gets guessed onto a contract or it sits in somebody’s head until Friday. Both of those are how a bin that reads 40,000 bushels turns out to hold 31,000.
Related reading: the forward contract problem no one talks about — fulfillment tracking.