A glovebox full of tickets
Every day, somewhere across your vans, a crew is tipping hedge cuttings, turf strips or soil at a transfer station, loading a skip, or taking hardcore to a recycling yard. Each one produces a slip of paper. Most end up in the van door pocket or the glovebox, and a few make it back to the office in a crumpled bundle on Friday.
Then someone asks for them. A commercial client wants disposal records for their environmental reporting. An auditor for a framework contract wants to see waste paperwork. The owner wants to know why disposal costs are so high this year. And the tickets are in a carrier bag.
Why the paperwork goes astray
Waste paperwork is created in the worst possible place: at a tip, in the rain, by a crew who want to get back to the site. It is paper, it belongs to no system, and nobody is waiting for it until much later.
- Tickets and notes are paper and are given to whoever drove.
- They are not linked to a job at the point of tipping.
- The office receives them in batches, if at all.
- Skip hire paperwork arrives separately from the hire invoice.
- Disposal costs are paid on account and never allocated to jobs.
What records you are required to keep, and for how long, depends on your waste carrier registration and the work you do. Your own adviser or the relevant regulator's guidance decides that. The system just makes sure what you do keep is complete and findable.
What the missing paperwork costs
When a client or auditor asks for records you cannot find, it looks worse than it is, and on commercial and public sector work it can cost you the contract. Disposal is also a real cost on landscaping jobs, especially clearances and garden builds with lots of spoil. When it is paid on account and never allocated, jobs look more profitable than they are and quotes do not include enough for tipping.
The waste log we build
- At the tip or when a skip is collected, the crew leader photographs the ticket or note in the app, which is already open on today's job.
- The image is read with OCR and AI extraction to pull out the date, site, waste type, weight or volume, and the reference number. A person in the office checks anything the system is unsure of.
- Each record is linked to the job, the vehicle and the crew, and the original image is kept.
- Transfer station and skip company invoices are matched against the logged tickets, so disposal costs are allocated to the jobs they came from.
- The office can search by client, site, date or waste type and export a record set for a client or auditor in a few clicks.
- A monthly summary shows disposal volume and cost by job type, useful when you set allowances in quotes.
| Asked for | Answered from |
|---|---|
| Disposal records for a client site | Log filtered by site, with ticket images |
| Paperwork for an audit | Export by date range |
| Disposal cost on a job | Tickets and matched invoices per job |
| Which jobs create most spoil | Monthly summary by job type |
| Missing tickets | Jobs with tipping recorded but no ticket photo |
After a season of using it
Tickets stop living in gloveboxes. When a client asks for records, the office sends them the same day. Disposal is costed against each job, so you can see what a clearance really costs you and price the next one properly. And the log flags jobs where tipping happened but no ticket was photographed, so gaps are chased while people still remember.
Does your waste paperwork look like this?
- Tip tickets come back to the office in bundles, or not at all.
- You have struggled to produce disposal records for a client or auditor.
- Disposal costs are paid on account and not allocated to jobs.
- Quotes include a rough allowance for tipping that nobody has checked.
- Skip paperwork and skip invoices never meet.