The yard routine for recording a load with no mobile signal

A waste movement can be recorded in a yard with no bars on the screen. The note is written and stored on the tablet or phone in your hand, held there, and sent up to the server later when the device finds a connection again. Nothing waits on the signal except the sending.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. An offline record is not a late record. The waste type, the EWC code, the weight off the weighbridge ticket, the carrier's details and the destination site are all captured while the lorry is still on the pad, so the note says what actually happened. What arrives at the server an hour later is that same note, unchanged.

The routine is four moves: open the form while you still have signal, fill it in at the tailgate, save once, then come back into range with the app open until the note reads synced. The step list further down carries the detail, including the two things to settle before you walk out of range.

The habit this replaces is the one most yards fall into: scribble the load on a pad, or trust it to memory, and type it up in the office at five o'clock. That is where weights get rounded, where a skip exchange turns into one movement instead of two, and where a waste description drifts from what was really in the bin. Digital waste tracking is coming in, and the transition is why most operators are suddenly thinking about the dead spot behind the shed at all. The dates and the legal detail sit on gov.uk. This page is about the yard.

If you only wanted the yes or no, the sibling question page answers it in a paragraph. The rest of this guide is the routine itself: why the signal drops where the loads are, what the record has to hold, the order to fill it in, what a note still sitting on a device means for you, and what the routine does not cover.

Coverage maps are drawn for a person standing outdoors holding a phone at head height. A skip yard is close to the opposite of that.

• Steel and concrete. A clad shed, a picking station, a weighbridge hut with thick walls and a metal roof: all of it sits between the device and the mast. A tablet inside a metal cabin is inside a box that blocks radio.
• Ground level. Transfer stations are often set down in a pit or behind a bund, and quarry floors and lagoon sites are lower still. Height helps a signal. Yards rarely have any.
• Where the sites are. Permitted sites end up on the edge of industrial estates, on old railway land and down farm tracks, because that is where the planning consent was. None of those are places networks optimise for.
• Busy hours. A mast that works fine at seven in the morning can crawl at half past eight when the estate fills up.

There is a worse case than no signal, and every driver knows it. One bar. The form thinks it has a connection, so it tries to send, and the operator stands holding a tablet that spins while the next lorry queues behind the first. No signal at least fails quickly. A flaky signal wastes the two minutes you were trying to save.

It is rarely the whole site, either. Most yards have one bay, one corner of the shed or one stretch of the weighbridge apron where it goes, and the crew know precisely where that is because they walk out of it to make phone calls. That is the spot the software has to survive, not the office.

This is why the answer cannot be "walk to the office" or "stand near the gate where it works". Whatever records your movements has to assume the connection is absent or unreliable and be built the other way round: write first, send later.

Being offline changes how a note is stored. It does not change what goes in it. The duty of care paperwork has always asked for roughly the same set of facts about a transfer, and a digital note asks for the same set again.

In practice you are capturing the waste itself, the quantity, who took it or brought it, and where it went. Skiplog's transfer note is built around those fields: waste type, the EWC code, the quantity, the carrier's details and the destination site, in a form meant to be completed in under two minutes on a phone or tablet at the tailgate.

Two fields are worth pausing on before you are standing in the rain.

The EWC code

The List of Waste code is the field people look up, and looking things up is the one thing a dead spot stops you doing. Decide your codes for the streams you actually handle, mixed skip waste, soils, plasterboard, green waste, wood, and know them before you need them. Anything hazardous is a different conversation with different paperwork, so treat asbestos and other hazardous streams as a consignment note job, not a quick tap on a tablet.

The quantity

The weighbridge ticket is your source of truth for the weight. Read it off the ticket rather than estimating, put it in kilograms, and type plain digits with no commas, no spaces and no unit letters. If your streams have a habit of being estimated by skip size, write down which ones and be consistent, because the quarterly numbers are only as good as the habit.

There is a third field worth a thought, and it is the carrier. When you start a note with a connection, Skiplog fills in the carrier name, the carrier's licence number and the destination from your most recent note, which saves retyping on a day of repeat tip runs. That carry-over is silent, so read those three fields before you save whenever the haulier has changed. A note started from the offline screen begins blank instead, so in the dead bay you will be typing the carrier and the CBDU number in full. Have them with you.

For the long version of the field list and how the form is laid out, the transfer note page in this pillar goes through it screen by screen.

Skiplog shows every note as queued, syncing or synced, and the sibling page on offline-first capture walks through how that queue behaves screen by screen. Standing in the yard, two consequences matter.

A queued note exists on that device and nowhere else. The load is recorded and the fields are safe, but the only copy is the one in your hand, and the office screens read the server rather than your tablet, so a queued note will not appear in the register yet. Treat it like a paper ticket in a hi-vis pocket: it is real, it counts, and it is one wash cycle away from gone.

A count of what is saved on a device is a prompt, not an audit. A note the office already holds can still show up as if it were sitting on the tablet, so when a count and a note's own status disagree, go to the note in the register and sync again rather than concluding a load is lost.

The queue also belongs to whoever is signed in on that tablet, which is why the sign-in and sign-out discipline is step one and not an afterthought. A queued note is fine for an hour and a problem for a week. That is the whole rule.

Follow the steps and the signal stops being on the critical path. Two situations sit outside them, and both are worth settling before a driver meets them in the rain.

A browser that will not store the note

Offline saving relies on the browser being allowed to store data on the device. Private or incognito windows, and locked-down browser settings, can refuse that, and when they do Skiplog tells you it cannot store the note on the device and the load is not recorded. The fix is to use a normal window on a browser that stays signed in, and until a note reads queued or synced, keep the paper ticket.

The device that never comes back

A queued note lives on one tablet. If that tablet is dropped in a skip, left in a cab that goes to another depot, or factory reset by someone tidying up, the notes on it go with it. The answer is routine rather than technology: get devices back into range daily and confirm the queue is empty before the kit leaves the yard.

A shared login makes handovers a discipline

A site signs in as one account today, so the weighbridge and the office share a login and the queue belongs to the device rather than to a person. Where kit is passed around, hand it over empty, because screens already opened can stay on that tablet for whoever picks it up next, and a queue left behind can end up filed under the wrong yard.

Two smaller things round it off. A phone at two percent, or one with no free space, cannot save a note, so chargers on the hut wall are most of that answer. And offline or online, the record is only as good as the weight and the code you entered: Skiplog is built to help you meet the mandate's record keeping requirements, and the accuracy of what goes in the fields stays with the operator.

Plenty of yards will run both for a while, and that is a reasonable position while habits change. A duplicate book in the hut costs nothing and gives a driver something to sign in the two weeks while everyone learns where the save button is.

There are two ways to run in parallel, and only one of them works.

The version that works: the digital note is the record, and the paper is a receipt. Every movement gets captured on the tablet. If a driver wants a slip, write one, and make clear that the tablet entry is the one that counts. Nobody re-keys anything, because the digital note was made first.

The version that does not work: paper is the record and someone types it up later. That is the old process with an app bolted on. You get the cost of both and the accuracy of neither, and the typing up is always the job that slips when a skip lorry breaks down.

One exception is worth keeping in your pocket. If a device refuses to store the note, hold the paper ticket until the load reads queued or synced somewhere, because at that moment the paper is the only record.

A photograph of the weighbridge ticket is useful belt and braces either way, since it is proof of the weight independent of what was typed. It is not a record on its own. A folder of images has no waste type, no code and no carrier, and it cannot become a quarterly return.

How long records have to be kept, and what counts as a valid digital equivalent to a signed copy, are questions for gov.uk rather than for us, and they are worth checking against the current guidance for your permit.

Capturing in a dead bay is only half the reason to bother. The other half is what those records do once they are on the server.

Synced notes become the site's compliance picture. Skiplog's operator dashboard shows the notes logged, the tonnage by waste type and a compliance status overview, so the manager can see the quarter building up rather than discovering it at the end. Because the quantity came off the weighbridge ticket at the tailgate rather than out of someone's memory at five o'clock, the tonnage lines up with what the weighbridge actually saw.

They also become the quarterly return. Skiplog generates the return as a one-click CSV export in a configurable EA-specified column layout, so the quarter's notes come out ready to submit without reformatting by hand. A return built from notes captured at the tailgate needs far less arguing with than one built from a pad and a memory.

Records are hosted on Amazon Web Services, and you sign in with an email address and a password. None of that changes what happens in the dead bay. It is just where the note ends up once the bars come back.

Any software can claim to work offline. It takes ten minutes in your own yard to find out what a product actually does, and the test is worth running before you sign up for anything, including us.

Walk to the worst part of the site, the corner where calls drop, and try this.

• Sign in and open the capture form while you still have a connection.
• Keep that form open, then put the device into airplane mode or genuinely stand in the dead bay, and fill in a full note from a real weighbridge ticket.
• Save it once. Look for a clear status on that note telling you where it is. If the screen says nothing, you have no way to know whether the load was recorded.
• Leave it a few minutes, still out of range, and check the queued note is still listed on the device.
• Walk back into range with the app open and watch the note send itself. Then check it appears in the office list as synced, with the weight and the code you typed in the yard.
• Try the unkind version too: close the app completely and open it cold in the dead bay. Whatever happens, you have learned where that product's line is. Skiplog's line is step two, which is why the yard habit is to open the form before you walk.

If a product saves cleanly out of range and tells you plainly where the note is, it will survive your yard. If it fails at the save, no amount of feature list will help you at half past seven on a Tuesday. The skip hire page in this pillar puts this in the wider context of the compliance half of the job, and the weighbridge ticket page covers getting the ticket into the note without typing it twice.