Knowing how you are performing compared to your region or industry, facilitates continuous improvement in management and water use. Unfortunately irrigation benchmarking data has in the past not been well recorded. The performance indicators measured are generally not well defined and calculations have not been standard across the industry. We talk about bales per megalitre, but what do we mean? The cotton industry has been developing an on-going process to capture water use information from growers and consultants. There are currently web-based tools available to collect this information, including the Water Benchmarking Tool (Cotton Catchments Communities CRC (Cotton CRC) and the Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC) 2007) and the commercially available WATERTRACK RAPID. The significance of these tools is that calculations of water use indices are standardised and are defined.