The problem
Every load of skip-hire, scrap, and construction waste in the UK travels with a waste transfer note. For decades that has been a paper form, and the UK is moving it to digital tracking.
A lot of the operators affected are small: single-truck owner-operators, family-run skip-hire companies, regional fleets of two to twenty vehicles. Most of them still ran on triplicate paper books and a file cabinet at the depot.
The idea was an app that worked the way the job works: outside, in the rain, in basements with no signal, with gloves on.
What I built
A four-step signature chain that followed a load from producer (the building site, the office, the factory) to carrier (the driver) to receiver (the transfer station), and then into a searchable archive.
- Offline-first capture. A driver could take a load, sign it, and hand off to the next party with no signal at all. The chain reconciled when any party came back online.
- Waste code lookup. Fuzzy search over the European Waste Catalogue with sensible defaults for the most common loads.
- Hazardous waste handling. When a load contained hazardous material, the app generated the extra consignment note with the right signatures on the right document.
- Exports. PDF exports for every party and the quarterly returns carriers used to assemble by hand.
How I worked on it
I owned the whole thing: the mobile app, the web dashboard for fleet managers, the data model, the back-end, and the support inbox. I sat on calls with drivers and changed things when they told me something didn’t work in the cab.
Where it ended up
I have stopped working on WTN App and it is no longer maintained. It stays here because the engineering was real and a lot of what I learned about sync and field software came from it.