If you've spent any time on a drilling rig, you know the ritual: the day winds down, the crew heads for the showers, and somebody — usually the toolpusher or the company man — sits down in front of a screen to transfer a day's worth of handwritten notes into the daily drilling report. It's the last chore standing between a 12-hour tour and sleep, and it's been done the same way for decades.
This guide covers what the IADC daily drilling report actually is, what goes in it, why it's worth doing right, and how crews are starting to get out from under the typing.
What the Report Is
The IADC (International Association of Drilling Contractors) daily drilling report is the industry-standard record of everything that happened on a rig during a 24-hour period. Operators and drilling contractors each keep their own versions, but the IADC format is the common language: when someone asks for "the morning report" or "the daily," this is usually what they mean.
It's a legal and commercial document as much as an operational one. The report is what backs up the drilling contractor's invoice, documents downtime and standby, and becomes the permanent record of the well. Years later, when there's a dispute about who was on the clock during a stuck-pipe event, the daily report is what everyone reaches for.
What Goes In It
The exact layout varies, but a complete daily drilling report generally covers:
- Well and rig identification — operator, contractor, rig number, well name, location, spud date, report number.
- Depth progress — depth at the start and end of the reporting period, footage drilled.
- Time log / operations summary — an hour-by-hour (or half-hour) account of every operation: drilling, tripping, circulating, rig repair, waiting on cement, safety meetings. This is the heart of the report and the section that settles arguments.
- Mud data — weight, viscosity, and other properties from the mud engineer's checks.
- Bit record — bit number, size, type, hours, and footage.
- Personnel on location — crew counts by company, which matters for both billing and emergency accountability.
- Safety information — meetings held, drills run, incidents recorded.
- Remarks — anything the next tour or the office needs to know.
The uncomfortable truth: every number in that report already exists — in the driller's tour sheet, the tallybook, the mud engineer's notes. The nightly report isn't knowledge work. It's transcription.
Why Sloppy Reports Cost Money
Three ways an incomplete or inconsistent daily report turns into real dollars:
- Billing disputes. Day rate, standby rate, and repair time carry different price tags. If the time log doesn't clearly support the invoice, the operator's drilling department will kick it back — and payment waits while somebody reconstructs a day from memory.
- Legal exposure. After an incident, the daily reports from the days before it get read very carefully by people who weren't there. Gaps and contradictions in the record never help the side that wrote them.
- Lost operational knowledge. The next well in the same field starts with the last well's reports. Vague remarks and missing details mean re-learning expensive lessons.
The Part Worth Automating
The data capture can't be automated — someone on the rig floor has to track what happened. But the transcription and formatting can be. That's the part that eats an hour of somebody's evening, and it's the part machines are genuinely good at.
That's what we built at OpsDoc Systems: snap a photo of the tallybook or tour sheet, and about two minutes later you have a formatted IADC-style daily report ready to send. Handwriting and all. You can also email the photo in from the rig and get the report back the same way — no app, no login, works from any location with cell signal.
The first report is free, no credit card — because nobody believes it works on real oilfield handwriting until they see their own.