A waste transfer note app for drivers: logging a tip run from the cab

A tip run is a lot of driving decisions and about ninety seconds of writing. You back onto the weighbridge, you take the ticket, you tip, and somewhere in that gap the transfer note has to be filled in: what the waste was, its EWC code, what it weighed, who carried it and where it went.

On paper that is a carbon book wedged in the door pocket, a biro that has lived in the cab since March, and a copy that stays with you until someone remembers to hand it to the office. None of it is hard. It is just the part that gets done last, or done on Friday from memory, or written on the back of a weighbridge ticket that goes through the wash.

So the yard moves its records onto a screen, and the driver gets handed one of two things. Either a system that was designed for someone sitting at a desk with both hands free, or something that behaves like the cab it is used in.

What a driver actually needs from it

The list is short. One screen, not five. Fields you can hit with one hand while the loading shovel is going behind you. Your own sign-in, so a note does not have to be filed under the boss's name. And it has to hold what you typed when the bars drop on the way back to the gate.

Skiplog's note is a single form carrying the EA-mandated fields, waste type, EWC code, quantity, carrier details and destination site, and alongside them the receipt-of-waste details the yard has to report on every load it takes in: when it was received, the form the waste came in, the containers it came in, the vehicle, and the hazardous and POPs details. It is built to be completable in under two minutes on a mobile or tablet, because two minutes is the honest size of the gap between the weighbridge and the next job.

Thin signal is handled the same way whoever is holding the device. A note saves on the device before any network call and carries a visible status, queued, syncing or synced, and it sends itself when connectivity returns, so a load written at the tip face is not lost while the bars come and go. The offline capture page in this pillar sets out how that behaves screen by screen, there is a separate page on the yard routine when there is no signal at all, and the tablet-in-the-yard page walks the note screen itself, so none of that is re-argued here. What follows is the driver's half of it: the order you do things in, and what the office needs out of your two minutes.

This is the bit that changes what a note at the weighbridge is worth. A site that receives waste has to report each load it takes in to Defra's receipt of waste service, and the window is short: two working days from the load arriving, on Defra's own spreadsheet. A note written on Friday from memory is already outside it.

Skiplog is built so the driver's two minutes are the only time the load gets typed. The same rules the upload applies are checked when the note is saved, so a field that would be refused is named there and then. The receipts screen exports the rows in Defra's template column order, exporting only the rows that pass and saying how many were held back and why, so the office is not guessing which line bounced.

After the upload the office confirms the batch as reported and records the reference Defra gives it, which is the proof a load is in the system. If Defra rejects a load, the date on the rejection notice sets a fresh two working day deadline rather than leaving it floating. And if a note that Defra has already accepted is corrected or removed later, it is flagged as a correction to report, with the reference it originally went in under.

The dashboard side of it is the office's screen, not the cab's: notes not yet reported, grouped as overdue, due today and due tomorrow, so nobody keeps a second list on the back of an envelope. What the driver needs to know is simpler. A note finished at the weighbridge, with the received details on it, is a load that leaves the yard's problem list the same week.

Three practical things, because a cab tablet rarely belongs to one person.

First, the device holds work. Notes recorded while offline sit on the device you recorded them on, along with a copy of the screens you have already opened. Signing out gives up that device's queue and clears those saved screens from it, so the habit worth having is simple: before you hand the tablet over or sign out at the end of the day, read the status on the notes you wrote and give them a minute of signal to send themselves.

Second, you do not have to share one login with the office. Skiplog keeps an account for each person added to the site, with the email address and the invite that put them there. Sign-in is an email address and a password, and a password reset is sent by email, which is worth more in a cab than it is at a desk. The page on a login each for the weighbridge and the office covers how a yard sets that up.

Third, a mistake is not the end of the record. If a note has to come off the register later, it comes off the register and off the quarterly return, and it stays on file for the two years the regulations require. Nothing a driver typed in a hurry is quietly destroyed, which is the point of keeping the records in one place rather than in a door pocket.

If the question on your mind is whether this will run on the knocked-about Android tablet already in the yard, there is a page in this pillar for that. If you are the one re-keying weighbridge tickets into a spreadsheet afterwards, start with the weighbridge ticket page instead. And if the load coming through the gate is somebody else's lorry, the page on checking a carrier's registration before you let it tip is the one you want.