Skiplog vs Alcumus: waste records at one permitted yard

You arrived here with a supplier already in mind, which makes this a question about adding or replacing rather than starting from nothing. Two things to say before anything else. Skiplog is on a waitlist and is not open for sign-up yet, so there is nothing to trial today and no reason to read this as a sales pitch with a deadline on it. And our research for this comparison captured no dated quote from alcumus.com: not a scope line, not a feature list, not a price.

We are not going to fill that gap from memory. A comparison page that gets another company's scope wrong costs you more than it saves, because you are the one who signs the contract and the one who answers an inspector. So every Alcumus cell in the table below says the same thing, that we have not verified it, and carries the question we would put to them instead. How fully or how fast they answer is not something we can tell you either.

What we can do is be exact about Skiplog, and give you a way of testing any supplier, the one you already pay or this one, against the paperwork sitting in your own office. That test is further down, and it uses last quarter's folder rather than anyone's sales deck.

The decision underneath the search is usually one of two shapes. Either waste records are the only thing your current supplier does not cover well, in which case you are pricing a second, narrow subscription against the cost of carrying on by hand. Or waste records are the whole reason you have software at all, in which case you are asking whether a broad compliance platform is the right size for a yard with one permit. Those are different conversations and they end in different places.

Skiplog is narrow on purpose. It is made for the operator of a single permitted skip yard or transfer station with somewhere between one and twenty staff, and the scope is a short list you could read out at the weighbridge.

The transfer note is written at the gate on a phone or tablet, with the EA-mandated fields on it, waste type, EWC code, quantity, carrier details and destination site, and it is built to be completable in under two minutes, because that is as long as a driver will stand there with the engine running.

Capture is offline-first. A note saves to the device first and carries a visible queued, syncing or synced status, then syncs on its own when connectivity returns. The device also keeps a copy of the screens you have already opened, so a load can be recorded in a black spot and sent when the signal comes back. Signing out gives up that device's queue and clears the saved screens from it, which matters on a tablet that lives in the office and goes out to the gate.

The yard is more than one person

A subscription covers one site, and more than one person can work in it. You add the office and the weighbridge to the yard, each person is invited by link and signs in as themselves, and every note names who wrote it, instead of the whole yard sharing one login. Sign-in is email and password. A second yard means a second site and a second subscription.

Records you can put right

A weight typed wrong, a carrier named wrong, an EWC code picked in a hurry: the register lists your notes with an action on each row to correct or remove one. Be straight about that form, because it is lighter than the one used at the gate. The waste description on it is free text rather than the picker, so it does not check the description against the EWC code and it does not raise the hazardous consignment notice the capture form raises, and the save button is not disabled while the correction goes, so a second tap can file a second correction. Worth knowing before you hand corrections to whoever is in the biggest hurry.

A note you remove comes off your register and your returns but stays on file for the two years the regulations require, so a mis-tap does not quietly delete a record an inspector may still want.

The register has a search box, and it appears once the office holds notes, so the third of March note is findable when someone asks for it. On a tablet that has been out of signal for a stretch, those notes sit as cards on the device and there is no search over them until they reach the office.

Registrations and the quarter

Carrier, broker and dealer registrations get a dashboard of expiry dates, with email alerts for anything expiring within 30 days. At the end of the quarter the EA return comes out as a one-click CSV export in a configurable EA-specified column layout, ready to submit without manual reformatting, and the column layout you set is kept with your site so the next quarter comes out the same way your area office asked for. One dashboard shows the notes logged, tonnage by waste type and a compliance status overview.

What it leaves out is everything else. One site per subscription. No health and safety module, no supplier or contractor accreditation, no training records, no job booking and no skip scheduling. If your paperwork problem is wider than waste, Skiplog on its own will not cover it, and you are better off knowing that here.

Stay with the supplier you already pay when

Waste is one obligation among several and the yard really does run on one supplier and one invoice. A second subscription is a second thing to renew and a second place for a record to hide when an inspector asks for the third of March. If you run the test above and your current supplier shows you the note on screen with the fields named, hands you the quarterly file, and answers the signal question without hedging, the simple move is to stay where you are. The same applies if you are mid-contract and otherwise happy. Ask the account manager those eight things before you spend anything new, because the cheapest waste software is the one you are already paying for.

Skiplog fits when

The waste record is the pressure point and nobody at the yard has compliance in their job title. If the transfer notes are a carbonless pad in the office, the quarterly return is an evening with a calculator and a pile of weighbridge tickets, and the only person who understands any of it also drives the lorry, then what Skiplog offers is narrow and specific. The EA-mandated fields are already named on the note. The quarterly return already comes out as a CSV in the column layout you set for your site. The sync status is on the screen the driver is holding, so a load written behind the shed is not a load taken on trust. The weighbridge and the office each sign in as themselves, so the note says who wrote it. It is priced as one line, £99 a month billed annually or £129 month by month, with a 60-day free trial, so you can set it against your current monthly cost rather than against a platform's entry tier. It is one site, which is the right size for one permit and the wrong size for a group. It is also still on a waitlist, so the honest timing question is whether your deadline leaves room for that.

If you are still weighing it up

Two questions tend to come before this one: whether the government's own waste tracking service already covers what your site has to do, and whether any product can call itself approved by Defra. Both have their own pages in this pillar, along with a wider buyer's guide for a small permitted site and a comparison with Ideagen if generic compliance software is the other option on your desk.