Skiplog vs WasteLogics for a small yard

Skiplog is built for one kind of business: a UK skip yard or transfer station with roughly 1 to 20 staff, getting ready for digital waste tracking. It covers digital waste transfer notes written at the weighbridge, carrier, broker and dealer registration expiry dates, a site dashboard of what has been logged, and the quarterly return to the Environment Agency as a file you can submit. One subscription covers one site. It does not book jobs, track containers or raise invoices, and it is not trying to.

WasteLogics is a separate product with its own website at wastelogics.com. We have not captured a dated quote from that site. So we are not going to describe their features, their pricing or their support, and we are not going to characterise who they sell to. Their column in the table below is a pointer to their own site. It is not a description we are asserting.

That is deliberate. A vendor writing about a rival gets it wrong, or gets it out of date. One wrong line about somebody else's product is enough to make a buyer distrust everything else on the page. So we will be specific about Skiplog, honest about what we have not verified, and leave you to read their site with the same eye you are reading ours.

Most operators arrive at this comparison from one of two directions.

The first is an operations problem. You have several vehicles, a growing book of hires, exchanges booked by phone and written on a whiteboard, and you want one system that knows where every container is and what each customer owes. That is a broad platform question. A single-purpose compliance tool will not answer it.

The second is a paperwork problem. The yard runs fine. The trouble is the folder of carbonless transfer notes in the office, the weighbridge tickets held together with a bulldog clip, and the quarter-end evening spent totalling tonnage into a spreadsheet so somebody can retype it into the return. Then digital waste tracking lands on top of that, and the question becomes who in a five-person business keeps the records in the shape the regulator wants.

Skiplog was made for the second problem. If you are in the first, a wider operations platform is the more sensible shortlist, and we would rather you found that out on this page than three months into a subscription. Check the current position on digital waste tracking on GOV.UK before you commit to any timetable, ours included.

Choose a wider operations platform if

Your bottleneck is the running of the business rather than the records. Booking and scheduling skip drops and exchanges, knowing which container is on which street, invoicing customers, managing drivers and routes: that is a bigger system than Skiplog, and a different category of product. Work out which vendors claim to cover that ground by reading each vendor's own site, then ask anyone you shortlist for a demo and a written price. Ask specifically what happens to a job when the driver has no signal, because that question separates products quickly.

Choose Skiplog if

The yard already works and the paperwork is the weak point. You are one site with a handful of staff, and the compliance record is currently a pad of carbonless notes and a spreadsheet nobody enjoys. You want the transfer note done at the weighbridge on a tablet that may have no signal, the quarterly return to come out as a file in the columns your area office asks for, and the cost to stay small enough that it is not a board-level decision. Skiplog is deliberately narrow so that it can be cheap and quick to learn. The trial runs for 60 days, long enough to put a full quarter of loads through it before you commit to a plan.

Consider neither, for now

The government runs its own digital waste tracking service. If it offers an interface you can use directly, and your volumes are low enough to key notes in one at a time, that may be all you need. We would rather say so than sell you something you can do without. Check the current position on GOV.UK. The case for paid software is about capture in the yard, working offline, and the return coming out in one piece, not about access to the service itself.

Whatever you shortlist, take the same four questions to every vendor and write the answers down with the date you got them.

• What happens with no signal? Not whether there is a mobile app, but what a driver sees when they press save in a dead spot, and where that note lives until it syncs.
• What comes out at quarter end? Ask to see the actual file, not a screenshot of a dashboard, and check whether you can set the column order to match what your area office asks for.
• How do you handle a note that was typed wrong? A weight read off the wrong ticket is the most ordinary mistake in a yard. Ask any vendor, us included, what happens to that note afterwards and what an inspector would see. Get the answer in writing rather than in a demo.
• What does it cost in year two? Setup fees, per-site charges and the price after any introductory period. Skiplog's numbers are on this page: £1,188 a year, or £129 a month, each with a 60-day free trial, one site per subscription.

One more is worth asking, because nobody thinks of it until it matters. What happens to the records if you stop paying. In Skiplog everything is kept while the account is open, because waste records have to span quarters and inspections, and a lapsed trial does not lock the records away: they stay readable and exportable. Deleting the account from the billing screen removes the account, the site and every record on it at once, and cancels a live subscription first, so download whatever the EA may still ask you for before you do that.

If a vendor will not put a price in writing, that is information too. It usually means the price is shaped by how big you are. A 60-day trial does the same job from the other side: you can watch the product do a quarter's work before any money moves.