AMCS vs Skiplog for a single permitted site

Short answer first. This comparison usually resolves itself once you count your sites, your vehicles and the people in your office.

Skiplog is for a UK skip yard or transfer station with 1 to 20 people. It does one job: the waste records the Environment Agency expects, captured on a phone or tablet at the weighbridge and pulled together into a quarterly return. It is not a booking system. It is not a routing system. It will not raise your invoices.

AMCS Group is the other name in your search. We publish a capability, a price or a positioning line for another company only when we have it in their own words, with the date we read it, and we have not captured that for AMCS Group. So their column below carries nothing about what their software does, what it costs or who they build it for. Their own site, amcsgroup.com, is where to read how they put it.

What we can be precise about is Skiplog. The rest of this page is written so you can tell in a few minutes whether a narrow tool fits your yard. If it does not, book the call with a larger vendor instead.

The moment most people are in when they search this is not a software evaluation. It is a deadline.

Digital waste tracking is coming, and the date Skiplog is built towards is October 2026. Commencement dates in this area have moved before, so check the current position on GOV.UK rather than taking any vendor's word for it, ours included. The shape of the work does not change. A duty of care record for every load. The waste description and EWC code, the tonnage, the carrier and their registration, the destination site. Kept in a form you can produce when someone asks for it.

Right now that work probably lives in a duplicate book in the office, a spike of weighbridge tickets, and a spreadsheet somebody totals at the end of the quarter. It works, until the driver is sat in the cab waiting, the book has been rained on, or the person who knows the spreadsheet is on holiday.

Three honest routes

• The government's own service. The mandate points at a statutory service. The first thing worth checking on GOV.UK is what its web interface lets an operator do directly. If your volumes are low and your office has a desk and a signal, that may be enough on its own. We have a separate page on that question, because it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.
• One system for the whole business. If you want jobs, containers, weighbridge, invoicing and reporting handled in the same place as the records, that is a different kind of purchase. Ask each vendor to confirm in writing which of those it covers for a yard your size. Expect to pay in licence cost, in configuration, and in the weeks it takes to move a business across.
• A single purpose record tool. You keep running the yard the way you run it. You change only how the records get made. Cheaper, faster to start, and deliberately limited. That is where Skiplog sits.

The trade-off is not features against price. It is breadth against how much of your week you want to spend implementing software while the deadline runs down.

Comparison pages in this market are usually written by whoever wants the sale. The other company's column gets filled in from memory, or from a three year old screenshot. We would rather hand you a thin column than a confident wrong one.

So AMCS Group's column says nothing about what their software does, what it costs, how it performs or how they look after customers. None of that is a criticism. It means go and ask them, then hold their answers to the same standard you hold ours.

If you do ring them, write the questions down before you dial. The offline one. The price for a single permitted site. How many logins that price includes. Whether a trial is possible. And what the quarterly return comes out of the system as.

Choose a narrow tool like Skiplog when

You run one permitted site with 1 to 20 staff. The paperwork is the problem, not the dispatching. You want the thing live in an afternoon rather than configured over a quarter. You want a number you can put in next month's budget without a sales process. And you are happy to keep your existing diary, invoicing and weighbridge arrangements exactly as they are.

It also suits you if signal at the weighbridge is unreliable. Recording a load on the device first, and letting it go to the office when the bars come back, is the whole reason Skiplog is built the way it is.

And it suits a yard where two or three people touch the records. The weighbridge writes the note, the office checks the quarter, and each of them is their own account rather than one password written on the back of the tablet.

Go and ask a larger vendor when

You run more than one site. A Skiplog subscription covers one site. Or a fleet. Or an office that needs bookings, containers, invoicing and reporting handled together rather than in several places. Skiplog does none of that. A compliance record on its own will not help you plan a day's collections or chase a customer's account.

Put that list in front of the larger vendors on your shortlist. AMCS Group is among the names you are already looking at. Ask each of them to confirm in writing which parts of it they cover, and at what price for your number of sites.

The same applies if your group has procurement standards we do not meet. Skiplog has no independent security audit or penetration test, no ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials certification, no single sign-on, no two-factor authentication and no signed data processing agreement. Say so early if any of those sit on your tender list, then ask a larger vendor what they hold.

How to decide without guessing

Write down the number of sites, the number of loads in your busiest week, and who physically fills in a transfer note today. Then ask every vendor on your shortlist the same questions, and compare the answers side by side. A trial that spans a quarter end is the cheapest test there is, because the return is the part that catches people out. Our guide to choosing waste tracking software for a small permitted site walks through that process in full, and our page on whether any software is 'approved by Defra' deals with the claim you will meet most often while you shop.