Every drilling contractor remembers the first time they saw a Plod filled out on a phone instead of a mud-splattered pad.

It felt like the future. No more torchlight scrawl at the end of a night shift, and no more driving a week's worth of paper back to the office for someone to retype. The daily drilling report went digital, and for a lot of contractors that was the single biggest admin upgrade in a generation.

So here's the uncomfortable question. If digital Plods were such a leap forward, why's your office still drowning in admin?

What daily drilling report software actually does

Let's be clear about what a daily drilling report tool is, because the market's full of overlapping names for it. Daily drilling report software, DDR software, digital Plod software. They're all the same thing. It replaces the paper Plod with a digital form your drillers fill out in the field, then pushes that data to a web portal where your team can review it and share it with the client.

That's genuinely useful, and for a while it was groundbreaking. Two things changed the moment the Plod went digital.

Your admin team stopped retyping. The hours that used to go into transcribing carbon copies into a spreadsheet just disappeared. The data lands in a consistent format across every rig and crew, so comparing performance stops being a manual reconciliation exercise.

And your clients got happier. Exploration geos were never thrilled about decoding a driller's handwriting at 6am. A clean digital Plod catches a transposed depth before it becomes an invoice dispute, and that gives the client more confidence in both the data and the bill at the end of the month.

If you're still on paper, a digital Plod is the obvious first move. Nobody's arguing otherwise.

The problem: the benefits stop at the Plod

Here's what nobody tells you when you buy a standalone daily drilling report tool. The Plod is one step in your operation, and the software fixes exactly that one step.

Everything on either side of it is still manual.

Your drillers are capturing beautiful digital Plods. Then your office is exporting that data and rebuilding it into progress claims by hand. Running rig performance reports in a separate tool. Managing pre-starts, take 5s, inspections and incidents on yet another system, or on paper. Reconciling what got drilled against what got charged in a spreadsheet somebody set up three contracts ago.

You've digitised the easy bit and left the expensive bits alone. The Plod was never where your admin hours were really disappearing. They were disappearing in the claim, the reconciliation and the reporting, and a DDR tool doesn't touch any of it.

Then there's how the data leaves the building. A lot of daily drilling report tools can only hand the client a PDF. That felt fine in 2015. It doesn't anymore.

Modern exploration teams don't want a PDF. They want the raw data, so they can run their own analysis and match it against their drill hole metadata without transcribing your report into something usable. A summary PDF strips out the detail they need to understand the hole, locks the data in a format they have to break back open, and carries no audit trail of what changed and when. For a client trying to verify the chain of custody on their data, that's a real problem, and increasingly it's the kind of thing that decides who wins the next contract.

What to look for if you want to go further

If you've hit the ceiling of what a standalone Plod tool can do, there's one question worth asking before you buy anything else. Does this fix one step, or does it connect the whole operation?

A few things separate a genuine end-to-end system from another point solution bolted onto the pile.

It captures more than the Plod. Your pre-starts, take 5s, inspections and rig schedules all live in one place instead of scattered across apps and paper. It's one system your crews actually learn once.

It carries the data through to the invoice. The real admin cost lives in the progress claim, so the test is whether claims build straight from approved Plod data against your actual contract rates. If you're still rekeying field data into an invoice, you haven't solved the expensive part.

It gives clients their data the way they want it. That means a clean CSV export or a client portal they can log into, with the audit trail intact. This one's fast becoming a differentiator when a client's choosing between contractors.

None of that requires a specific brand. It's just the checklist worth taking into any conversation with a software vendor, so you don't end up digitising one more step and leaving the other nine alone.

The bottom line

Digital Plods were a real step forward, and if you're still on paper they're the right place to start. But a daily drilling report tool on its own solves the step that was never really the problem.

The Plod was step one. The contractors pulling ahead right now are the ones who worked out there were nine more steps behind it, and went looking for something that handled all of them.

It's worth asking yourself where your admin hours actually go this week. If the honest answer is that they're spent chasing Plods into claims and claims into invoices, then a better Plod isn't going to fix that.

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This is the thinking behind how we built CorePlan. It runs the whole drilling operation in one place, from field capture through to progress claims and client sharing, rather than digitising the Plod and leaving the rest to spreadsheets. Terra Drilling took that path and now saves around 30 hours of admin time every week (read their story). If you're weighing up your options, have a look at CorePlan for drilling contractors and see how it stacks up against your checklist.

Want to see how the different tools compare first? Our guide to understanding drilling software walks through every type on the market, along with the key features and what the leading contractors servicing the mining industry are doing with it.

Download the checklist here

CorePlan vs Krux: What's the difference?

Explore powerful features that outperform Krux.

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Daily drilling reports: Why digitising the Plod was only ever step one

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