Which aggregate size actually earns you money

A crusher plant produces several sizes from one input. Prices differ, demand differs, and the proportion of each is largely set by the crusher and screen configuration rather than by choice.

Which raises a question most plants cannot answer: which size is actually profitable, and which is being carried?

Why the obvious answer is usually wrong

The instinct is that the highest-priced size is the most profitable. That holds only if cost is allocated correctly, and usually it is not.

Boulder, power, wear parts and labour are consumed producing all sizes simultaneously. Attributing them by revenue share — which is the common shortcut — mechanically makes the highest-priced product look best, because you allocated cost using the very number you are trying to test.

Allocating by tonnage instead gives a different and more useful picture. It is not perfect either, since sizes do not consume equal crushing effort, but it is honest about what it assumes.

Where dust sits

Crusher dust is the item most often misjudged. It is produced whether or not you want it, priced low, and frequently treated as a nuisance.

But it is also produced at effectively zero marginal cost — the boulder was already crushed for the sizes above it. Whether dust earns or loses depends almost entirely on whether it moves. Dust that sells at a low price is contribution. Dust that accumulates is occupying yard space and, eventually, becomes a disposal cost.

The number worth watching is not dust price. It is dust movement against dust production.

What you need before this is answerable

• Production by size, measured rather than estimated from the screen configuration
• Sales by size, which most plants have from billing
• Closing stock by size, so production and sales can be reconciled
• Boulder consumed, to establish overall yield
• Direct costs by period — power, wear parts, fuel, labour

The gap in most plants is the first and third. Sales are recorded because they are billed; production and stockpile levels are estimated because nobody weighs a stockpile.

The decisions this changes

Screen configuration

If a size consistently accumulates while another is short, the configuration is producing to the machine's convenience rather than the market's demand. Changing screens has a cost, and knowing the accumulation is real rather than suspected is what justifies it.

Pricing

Knowing cost per tonne by size lets you discount deliberately. A size that is accumulating can be discounted to move it, and you can say by how much before it stops being worthwhile.

Which customers to chase

Customers who take a spread of sizes are worth more than the price list suggests, because they consume the mix you actually produce. A customer who only takes the popular size leaves you holding the rest.

That is a genuinely useful insight and it is invisible without size-wise data.

Start simple

You do not need perfect costing. Production by size, sales by size, and stock by size for three months will tell you most of what you need — specifically, which sizes are accumulating and which are always short.

That alone usually changes a pricing decision or a screen decision, and it costs nothing but recording what already happens.

If you want to see this reported against your own plant, see our crusher ERP or book a demo.