Your fleet is wearing out where you cannot see it.
Your machines earn on other people's sites, run by operators you do not employ. The wear, the downtime and the early retirement come back to you, usually with no cause anyone can name. That is the silent cost. The disputed hours and fuel are the visible one.
Darikoda gives you hour-meter, fuel, daily-status and damage evidence, attributed to the cause and the operator, to protect the asset and defend the invoice. Captured at source.
You own the machine but you do not operate it, so wear, downtime and early retirement land on you, often with no cause on record. Darikoda attributes damage, hours and fuel to the cause and the operator, so you protect the asset and defend the invoice. Captured at source.
Where the margin leaks
The six places a plant hire firm quietly loses margin it never sees.
The wear you cannot see, and cannot recover.
The machine comes back from the client's site worn, and the cause is never on record. Was it hard driving, a missed check, or fair use? Without operator PIN, condition log and fault report, you absorb it, the service interval creeps in, and you retire the asset early. The biggest cost on a hired machine is the quietest.
Service missed under someone else's operator.
A missed service does not only create repair cost. It can remove the machine from hire, force the client to rent outside, damage trust and reduce resale value. When the operator is not yours and not incentivised, the warning signs reach you late or not at all.
Hours dispute at month-end.
The client's monthly hours statement lands. Your record is verbal or stitched from three operators, theirs is the one with structure. The deduction wins because the evidence wins. Industry-typical revenue slippage from disputed hours runs 15 to 20 percent on weak-evidence contracts.
Fuel against the deduction.
You supply fuel. They deduct against it. When dispenses are not captured at the event with operator, quantity, photo and GPS, the deduction reads whatever the client's timesheet says. One of your largest cost lines, weakly evidenced.
Earning status per machine.
Earning, idle, faulty, not needed, waiting transport, due service, available for redeployment. Without a live view, the machine sitting on a completed scope keeps drawing depreciation without producing revenue.
Hire-rate justification at renewal.
When the client challenges the rate, per-asset operating cost evidence defends it. Fuel, parts, maintenance, service against revenue earned. Without that, the renewal becomes a negotiation about feelings, not numbers.
Your machine. Your fuel. The deduction defended.
The machine wears on someone else's site, the fuel is deducted against you, and the hours get argued. The record defends all three.
What changes at the moment of dispute
Three scenarios where the deduction game becomes winnable.
The client's monthly hours statement lands. 180 hours billed, 152 paid. The 28-hour gap walks because your record is a verbal handover and three operator notes. At GHS 600/hour internal-hire rate that is GHS 16,800 absorbed per machine on one dispute.
Operator PIN at start, stop and idle. Hour-meter time-stamped with GPS. The subcontractor opens the same structured record you do. The deduction conversation happens with evidence rather than assertion.
Per-event hour-meter
the unit at which the deduction game becomes winnable.
You supplied 4,200 litres to the subcontractor this month. Their record shows 3,800. The 400-litre gap is deducted from your invoice. The dispense receipt is unsigned and dated three weeks late.
Each dispense attributed to the dispensing operator and evidenced at the event. The fuel ledger is structured rather than reconstructed. The deduction conversation has evidence on your side.
USD 5K / month
recovery on a USD 100K monthly diesel supplied at 5% absorbed variance. (Illustrative model, your number from the audit.)
Excavator parked on completed scope at Project A for three weeks. Project D urgently needs one. Subcontractor at Project D rents externally at premium rate. You pay depreciation on the idle machine; they pay rental on someone else's machine; the same brand on both sides.
Daily-status view: earning, idle, faulty, not needed, available for transfer. Project D head office sees the available machine the morning it becomes free. The redeployment conversation happens before the external rental.
Redeployment view
what can move, what should stay, what needs a low-bed.
Different scenarios. Same underlying gap. Same closing move.
The litre is evidenced before the tanker leaves.
Dispense, fault and return captured as they happen, so month-end opens with your count.
Built so the per-asset record survives the deduction cycle.
Dispense, fault, return. Your month is decided at moments nobody can reconstruct afterwards, so each one is captured as it happens.
- Every field write at the bowser, the workshop, and the operator station is saved on the spot and syncs when signal returns.
- You can always see whether a field entry has reached the office yet. No silent gaps between dispense and deduction conversation.
- Every hour, fuel event and fault is attributed to operator PIN, machine, project, and time. Hire-rate justification has a per-asset record.
- Shared tablets at the bowser and the workshop use PIN-level operator attribution. The dispensing operator and the receiving operator each leave a clean trail.
- Failed syncs at the remote project become visible issues, not silent gaps in the deduction defence.
- Per-asset operating cost feeds the renewal conversation directly. Rate defence becomes evidence-led rather than negotiation-led.
Inside a typical month
What a Darikoda month looks like at a plant hire firm.
From contract envelope on day one to rate defence at renewal.
Day 1 of contract
Each machine gets its contract envelope.
Per-client rates, deduction rules, fuel-supply structure, reporting cadence. The same per-asset record serves all clients, sliced by the rules each contract demands.
Daily
Bowser dispense PIN-attributed at the event.
The operator on duty, the quantity and the proof captured at the dispense. The fuel ledger is structured by the time the workshop closes.
Weekly
Daily-status view drives redeployment decisions.
Earning, idle, faulty, not needed, available for transfer. Head office sees what can move, what should stay, what needs a low-bed.
Month-end
Deduction defence pack ready before the statement lands.
Hours, fuel, daily status, fault log. Structured per machine, per operator. The deduction conversation has evidence on your side before it starts.
Renewal cycle
Per-asset operating cost defends the rate.
Fuel, parts, service, repairs against revenue earned. Hire-rate justification becomes a number rather than a negotiation.
A note from Theo
“The fleet is the business, but the record is what gets paid.”
Plant hire firms I worked with across Caterpillar and Unatrac in Ghana shared one operational reality. The fleet is the business, but the record is what gets paid. The subcontractor's end has structured evidence on their side. The owner's end has paper receipts, verbal hand-offs, and a workshop log written three days late. The deduction game is decided before the dispute lands. The operating record is what closes that gap. Per-machine, per-event, per-operator, PIN-attributed and time-stamped. The deduction defence becomes evidence-led rather than memory-led. The asset you own finally keeps its own evidence.
Theo Ilori
Founder, Darikoda. UCL MSc Mechanical Engineering. Formerly GE precision turbines, Caterpillar/Unatrac Ghana & Nigeria.
Plant hire firm FAQ.
The questions other Ghana plant hire firms ask in the first call.
We have 80 machines across multiple clients. How does Darikoda configure?
Each client gets its own contract envelope inside the same operating record. Rates, deduction rules, fuel-supply structure and reporting cadence are configured per client. The same per-asset record serves all of them, sliced by the rules each contract demands.
Our operators are not directly employed. Can we still attribute?
Yes. On wet hire the operator is usually the subcontractor's, not yours. PIN-level worker attribution at the tablet handles that, regardless of who employs the operator. The hours, the fuel, the faults and the condition stay attached to the person at the controls. That is the basis for the deduction defence and the asset-condition record.
How does the platform handle remote sites on patchy connectivity?
Every field write saves locally first and syncs when signal returns. Operators do not wait for connectivity to log an hour-meter, a fuel event or a fault. Failed syncs become visible issues, not silent gaps.
Does it replace Cat Product Link, Sky Ledge or our existing tracker?
No. Trackers handle GPS and basic telemetry. Darikoda is the operating record above that: the layer that ties hours to the contract, fuel to the deduction, operator to the asset condition. We integrate telemetry where it exists. We do not replace the tracker.
What is the minimum fleet size where this makes commercial sense?
From around 20 assets the deduction defence and the redeployment view start to pay back materially. Below that, the manual paper-timesheet workflow may still be cheaper than the structured approach. The Operational Audit produces the specific threshold for your operation.
From the Operating Notes
Field analysis that goes deeper on this.
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Patterns described here are drawn from extensive field audits and industry research across Ghana's mining, construction, roadworks, and quarry sectors. No specific operator is named or identifiable.