Thursday afternoon, three phones ringing
It is Thursday afternoon before a bank holiday weekend. Everyone in the town has decided to clear the garage. The office has three lines ringing, and the person answering them is looking at a paper diary and shouting across to the yard to ask how many 8 yard skips are left. The yard foreman says four, but two of those are dented ones waiting for repair, and one is actually booked out on a job written on a sticky note.
Meanwhile the website booking form has taken two more orders for Friday morning. Nobody has looked at them yet.
On Friday at seven the drivers find they have six deliveries booked for 8 yard skips and three empty ones in the yard. Someone gets a phone call apologising, someone gets a 6 yard skip instead, and someone waits until Tuesday.
Why the count is always wrong
The number of empty skips of each size changes constantly, and it changes in places the office cannot see. A skip becomes available only when it has been collected, tipped and brought back. It becomes unavailable the moment it is booked, even though it is still sitting in the yard.
- Bookings are taken in three places, the phone, the website and the drivers who agree exchanges on site, with no single list.
- The whiteboard shows skips physically in the yard, not skips already promised to someone.
- Skips that are collected full are not available again until they have been tipped, which may be the next day.
- Damaged or dirty skips are counted as stock until someone notices.
- Firms with a second depot have two whiteboards and a lot of phone calls between them.
So the answer to "do we have an 8 yarder for Friday?" is always an estimate, and on busy days the estimates add up to more skips than exist.
The price of a broken promise
A customer let down on the morning of a booked delivery rarely books with you again, and often says so in a review. The substitute size you send instead may be too small, which leads to an overloaded skip, a second visit and an argument about extra charges.
Inside the business, double bookings wreck the drivers' day. Routes get rearranged at seven in the morning, exchanges are delayed to free up a skip for a new delivery, and the office spends Friday apologising instead of taking bookings. On the quieter days the opposite happens: you turn away work because nobody is sure what is free.
How we build live skip availability
What we build is a single booking and availability record that every channel writes into, with the skip stock counted by size, depot and day.
- Every booking, whether taken on the phone, on your website or by a driver on site, goes into the same booking record with the skip size, depot, date and address.
- Availability for a size and day is worked out from empty skips in stock, minus those already booked, plus those due back and tipped before that day.
- Drivers mark skips delivered, collected and tipped in a simple app, so the count follows the skip rather than the whiteboard.
- Skips can be marked out of service for repair or cleaning, which removes them from the count until they are released.
- The office booking screen and the website form both check availability before confirming, and offer the next available day or an alternative size when a date is full.
- A morning screen for the yard shows what goes out today, what comes back and what the evening stock should be, so any discrepancy is spotted by lunchtime.
| Skip status | Counts as available? |
|---|---|
| Empty in yard, not booked | Yes |
| Empty in yard, booked for a date | No, from that date |
| On hire at a customer | No, until collected and tipped |
| Collected full, not yet tipped | No, until tipped |
| Out of service for repair | No, until released |
The skip sizes, the depots and the rules about how much stock to hold back for exchanges are yours to set. We do not replace your accounts package; paid bookings and invoices are passed to it.
A bank holiday Thursday with the new system
The phones still ring. The person answering them types the postcode, picks 8 yard for Friday, and the screen says there are none left for Friday but two for Saturday morning, or a 6 yard for Friday. The customer picks Saturday. The website shows the same thing to people booking online, so it stops taking orders it cannot fulfil.
In the yard, the foreman marks two dented skips out of service, and the office count drops by two immediately. On Friday morning the drivers' list matches the skips in the yard. Nobody makes an apologetic call before eight.
Could this be your yard?
- Someone in the office regularly shouts to the yard to ask how many skips are left.
- Website bookings are checked by hand before they are confirmed, sometimes too late.
- You have sent a smaller skip because the size booked was not there.
- Damaged skips stay on the whiteboard until a driver tries to take one out.
- Two depots swap skips by phone and nobody records it.