What a settlement statement actually carries
A settlement statement is the document a grain elevator, co-op, or livestock buyer issues after a delivery or sale — and it carries far more than a bank deposit ever will. Gross bushels or hundredweight delivered, the price applied, a dockage table for moisture or foreign material, drying and storage charges, checkoff assessments withheld, sometimes freight — every one of those numbers exists on the statement itself, and none of them survive onto the bank statement, which shows only the net figure that came out the other end.
Reading a settlement statement means turning that whole breakdown into structured data — not just the net total, which is the one number a bank statement already provides, but everything that produced it.
Why settlement statements resist a simple template
Every elevator lays it out differently
A regional co-op's statement and a large grain company's statement organize the same underlying fields — quantity, price, deductions — in completely different table layouts, with different column names for the same concept.
Dockage and quality adjustments are their own small calculation
A moisture or test-weight adjustment often applies as a percentage against gross weight before the price is even calculated, producing an intermediate number that isn't gross or net but sits between the two.
One statement can cover several loads or commodities
A statement summarizing a week of deliveries, or listing wheat and soybeans together, needs each load or commodity kept distinct rather than summed into a single line.
Checkoff and freight aren't always itemized the same way twice
The same elevator can present a checkoff deduction as one line in one statement and folded into a broader "other deductions" line in another, depending on the delivery.
None of these four make a settlement statement unusual or poorly designed — they're the normal variety across elevators, co-ops and buyers, and exactly why a fixed template built for one elevator's layout tends to break the moment a second elevator's statement is uploaded.
What gets read
| Field | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Gross quantity | Bushels, hundredweight or units delivered before any adjustment |
| Price applied | Per-unit price used to calculate gross value |
| Dockage / quality adjustment | Deduction for moisture, foreign material or grade |
| Drying and storage | Per-unit or flat charges for conditioning and holding |
| Checkoff and freight | Assessment and transport deductions, where itemized |
| Net amount paid | The figure the statement says was actually settled |
Six fields, read as they actually appear on the statement in front of them — not inferred from a typical layout, and not assumed present if the statement genuinely doesn't itemize one of them.
Reading the deduction stack
Deductions on a settlement statement rarely apply in a single step — dockage reduces the payable quantity first, price is applied to what's left, and drying, storage and checkoff are then subtracted from that gross value in sequence. Reading the deduction stack means preserving that order, not just totaling every deduction line into one lump figure.
Confidence, not silent assumption
Every field extracted carries a confidence level rather than being treated as certain. A clearly printed gross-quantity figure on a clean statement reads at high confidence. A dockage percentage buried in small print on a faxed copy, or a deduction line with an ambiguous label, reads at a lower confidence and is flagged for a quick look rather than accepted without question.
When the net figure doesn't add up
Occasionally, gross quantity times price minus the listed deductions doesn't equal the net amount the statement itself prints — usually because of a scale ticket correction, a rounding convention, or a quality adjustment applied after the initial calculation. That discrepancy is surfaced directly rather than silently reconciled by adjusting one of the numbers to force agreement.
Seeing the gap is usually enough to know what happened — a correction noted elsewhere on the statement, or a small rounding difference within a cent or two that's well within normal tolerance for a real-world settlement.
The check this runs every time
| Check | What it confirms |
|---|---|
| Gross × price = gross value | The base calculation before any deduction is applied |
| Gross value − deductions = net | Every listed deduction actually explains the gap to net |
| Net on statement = net paid | The statement's own printed total matches what it claims to settle |
This is a consistency check against the statement's own printed math, not an audit of whether the price or dockage rate applied was fair — that's a marketing decision, not an arithmetic one.
How it works
Upload the settlement statement
Any elevator, co-op or buyer's format — PDF, scan, fax or photo.
Every field is read
Gross quantity, price and each deduction, kept linked to the statement it came from.
Checked against the printed net total
With a confidence level on every extracted field and a flag on anything that doesn't reconcile.
Export
Excel, CSV or JSON — one row per load or commodity, with every deduction as its own column.
A harvest split across many loads
Some elevators settle every individual load with its own scale ticket and price; others batch a week or a whole harvest into one summary statement. Both shapes are read the same way — when a statement lists multiple loads, each keeps its own quantity, price and deduction detail rather than being flattened into a single averaged line, so a load-by-load view is still available even from a summary document.
One settlement, worked
A single soybean delivery, 1,120 bushels, with dockage and drying applied before the net figure is paid.
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Gross bushels delivered | 1,120 |
| Dockage, 1.5% | −16.8 bu |
| Net payable bushels | 1,103.2 |
| Price per bushel | $12.85 |
| Gross value | $14,176 |
| Drying and checkoff deducted | −$310 |
| Net amount paid | $13,866 |
Read on its own, $13,866 tells a farm nothing about whether the price or the dockage applied was reasonable for that delivery. Read as the full chain above, every step from gross bushels to net payment is visible and checked, and the figure that lands on the bank statement two days later is fully explained rather than taken on trust.
Livestock settlement statements
A livestock buyer's settlement statement carries a similar shape with different units — weight instead of bushels, price per hundredweight instead of price per bushel, and deductions for trucking, yardage or commission instead of drying and storage. The same reading method applies: every field extracted as its own line, checked against the statement's own printed net total.
Spot, basis and hedge-to-arrive contracts
Not every settlement follows a simple spot-price sale. A basis contract locks in a price relative to a futures market at delivery, settled later once the futures leg is priced. A hedge-to-arrive contract fixes the futures price ahead of delivery, with basis added afterward. Each produces a settlement statement with its own reference to a futures price and a basis figure that a spot-sale settlement never shows.
Reading these correctly means recognizing the contract type from the statement's own language and extracting the futures reference and basis alongside the ordinary gross-quantity-and-price fields, rather than treating every settlement as if it were a simple spot sale and losing the pricing mechanism that actually produced the figure.
Comparing settlements across seasons
Because every settlement is read into the same structured fields regardless of which elevator issued it or which season it came from, comparing this year's dockage rate, drying charge or effective price against last year's becomes a matter of filtering the export rather than pulling out a stack of old statements and re-reading them by hand.
That comparison is often what first reveals a pattern worth a conversation with an elevator — a drying charge that's crept up year over year, or a dockage rate that's noticeably higher than a neighboring elevator's on comparable grain, neither of which is obvious from looking at any single season's settlements in isolation.
Freight and transport deductions
When a farm delivers to an elevator further from the field than the nearest option — chasing a better basis or a specific buyer's program — a freight or trucking deduction sometimes appears on the settlement itself, netted against the price rather than billed as a separate invoice. Reading it as its own line, distinct from drying, storage or checkoff, keeps the true delivered price visible even when the elevator's own statement bundles freight into a single net deduction figure.
That distinction matters most for an operation comparing net returns across two elevators at different distances — the elevator with the better posted price isn't necessarily the better net return once freight is properly separated out and accounted for.
Storage fees on grain held past delivery
Grain delivered to an elevator but held in storage rather than sold immediately accrues its own ongoing storage charge, billed either monthly or at the point the grain is finally priced and settled — a different pattern from the one-time drying charge applied at delivery. A settlement statement covering grain that sat in storage for months carries a storage deduction that reflects that whole holding period, not just the delivery event, and reading it correctly means recognizing it as a distinct, time-based charge rather than a flat per-bushel fee like drying.
Grain shrink — a small moisture-related weight loss that can occur during extended storage — sometimes shows up as its own adjustment line for the same reason, and is read the same way: as its own category, not folded into ordinary dockage from the original delivery.
What accuracy actually looks like
A clean, digitally generated settlement statement from a large elevator reads at high confidence across nearly every field. A faxed or hand-annotated statement from a smaller buyer, with a dockage note scrawled in the margin, produces a larger review queue — not because the extraction is weaker, but because the source document itself carries more genuine ambiguity.
Across a typical harvest with a mix of clean digital statements and a handful of older or faxed ones, most farms see somewhere between 85% and 95% of fields land at high confidence, with the rest resolved in a short review rather than a full manual re-key.
What comes out
Excel, CSV or JSON, structured so that gross quantity, price and every deduction category are their own column — not a single settlement total. That level of detail is what makes the export useful for more than just a bookkeeping entry: it's the same breakdown a farm would need to spot-check an elevator's dockage schedule or compare pricing across buyers over a season.
Who this is for
Grain and oilseed operations
Every settlement's deduction stack read and checked, without re-keying gross bushels and price by hand each time.
Livestock operations
The same reading method applied to a buyer's weight-and-price settlement statement.
Accountants and bookkeepers serving ag clients
Settlement detail that drops directly into a categorized income record, regardless of which elevator issued it.
Operations working with more than one buyer
A consistent structure across statements from different elevators or co-ops, instead of a different manual process for each.
What this doesn't do
Doesn't audit whether a price or dockage rate was fair
It confirms the statement's own numbers are internally consistent — it doesn't second-guess the elevator's pricing or grading decisions.
Doesn't connect to an elevator or co-op's system
There's no login, no API, no account connection. You download or receive the settlement statement yourself and upload it here.
Doesn't calculate tax treatment on a deferred payment contract
Whether a settlement is reported this year or next under a deferred-payment arrangement is a tax question for your accountant.