Waste & recycling
Software for haulers that bills every service event
The extra lift happens at 7:40am. Your invoice is built Friday. What happened in between lives in a driver's memory, and that is the leak.
What makes waste and recycling different
4 things that decide this
- 01Revenue leaks between systems, not inside them. Dispatch knows the extra lift happened, billing never hears about it, and roll-off extras live in QuickBooks workarounds.
- 02A missed-pickup dispute without service verification costs a credit every time. Proof of service is a photo, a timestamp and a location, captured at the stop.
- 03Recyclers price inventory against moving commodity markets while scale tickets wait to be retyped into the ledger. The month-end number is stale by construction.
- 04The funded vertical platforms serve route billing well. The seams between dispatch, the scale house and accounting are where custom work earns its keep.
Haulers, roll-off operators and the scale house
Residential route haulers, roll-off operators and recyclers run three different businesses that happen to share trucks. Routes are recurring and dense. Roll-off is on-call, asset-tracked and exception-heavy. A scale house runs on weights, grades and commodity prices. Software that fits one usually ignores the other two.
We build the connective work: the pipeline from a service event to a line item, whichever of the three businesses produced it. Your routing platform and your accounting stay. The retyping between them goes.
- 01Owners and GMs buy billing that catches extras, return trips and overloaded containers.
- 02Ops managers buy dispute answers: served, verified, photographed, closed.
- 03Controllers buy scale tickets that reach the ledger the day the truck crossed the scale.
- 04PE platform teams buy one billing pipeline across acquisitions that each brought their own stack.
In production
Numbers from the closest problem shapes we have shipped
40%
Fewer manual errors after replacing paper field records (TankAware)
30%
Less operational overhead across distributed sites (TankAware)
4X
Faster payment collection in a recurring-crew operation (Maidily)
The work we take in this sector
Glue first: the platforms you run keep running.
Dispatch-to-invoice pipeline
Every service event becomes a line item: the scheduled stop, the extra lift, the blocked-access return, the overload fee. Exceptions feed billing instead of vanishing.
Proof of service
Photo, GPS and timestamp captured at the stop, attached to the customer record. The dispute call ends with a link instead of a credit.
Scale-ticket capture
Tickets flow from the scale to inventory and the ledger as trucks cross, graded and priced. Commodity exposure is visible daily, not at month end.
Roll-off order flow
Order, delivery, swap, final pull and every rental day between them, tracked per container. The asset list stops living in a spreadsheet.
Customer portal and disputes
Service history, photos and invoices in one place customers can check themselves. The calls that remain are the ones worth a person's time.
Acquisition integration
Roll-ups inherit a billing stack per acquisition. We build the pipeline that reads them all while migrations happen on their own schedule.
- DispatchStop scheduled
- ServiceDone, plus exceptions
- VerifyPhoto, GPS, time
- BillEvery event a line item
- ReconcileLedger matches the street
The leak is never inside one system. It is the gaps between dispatch, the truck, the scale and the ledger, each bridged today by retyping.
The unbilled extra
Route sheets were built to prove the route ran, not to catch what changed along it. The extra lift, the second trip after a blocked alley, the container filled past its rate: drivers do the work, and the route sheet has nowhere to put it.
Vendors in this space describe working days that still run on paper, spreadsheets and the phone (Hauler Hero, Routeware). The fix is a capture path for exceptions that is faster than ignoring them, wired straight into billing. We trace one week of your routes from dispatch to invoice and hand you the leak map, free.
- An exception a driver can log in five seconds gets logged.
- Billing reads the service record, never a retyped copy of it.
- Disputes close with evidence.
Field operations we have taken off paper
“TankAware has revolutionized how we manage petroleum sites. The real-time data and automation have exceeded expectations.”
Blake Sutherland · President, Sutherland Excavating Ltd.
The platform pitch, and how we scope it instead
Starting point
The vertical platform pitch
Migrate routing, billing and customers onto the platform.
How we scope it
Keep what works. Build the pipeline between dispatch, scale and ledger first.
Exceptions
The vertical platform pitch
Handled if the platform has a field for them.
How we scope it
Modeled from your actual route sheets, because the exceptions are the leak.
Recyclers
The vertical platform pitch
A hauler product with a scale module.
How we scope it
Scale-house flow built for grades, moisture and commodity pricing.
Price
The vertical platform pitch
Per truck, per month, forever.
How we scope it
Fixed price after a free scoping call. A paid two-week diagnostic applies only where existing code must be read.
What this work runs on
Where we usually build
Field capture
Systems we sit beside
Questions haulers and recyclers ask
01We already run routing software. Why would we need custom work?+
Because the leak is usually between systems, not inside one. Routing platforms run routes well. The extras, return trips and overload fees that never reach the invoice fall in the gap between dispatch and accounting. We build that pipeline and leave your routing platform alone. If your platform already closes the gap, the free audit will say so and cost you nothing.
02What does the free Route-to-Invoice Audit cover?+
One truck, one week. We trace every stop from dispatch to the invoice it produced, flag services that were done but never billed, and flag disputes that had no service record behind them. If you run a scale, ticket flow to the ledger is included. You keep the written leak map whether or not you hire us.
03How does proof of service actually settle disputes?+
A dispute settles when the evidence is specific: this container, this timestamp, this photo, this location. We capture that at the stop, automatically, and attach it to the customer record. The office answers a missed-pickup call by sending a link. Credits stop being the default outcome, and the pattern of real misses becomes visible instead of anecdotal.
04We are a recycler, not a hauler. Does this apply?+
The scale house is its own build, and it is the part hauler platforms treat as an afterthought. Tickets captured as trucks cross the scale, grades and moisture recorded once, inventory valued against current commodity prices instead of last month's. Your ledger stops waiting for retyping. The audit works the same way: one week of tickets, traced to the ledger.
05We acquired two haulers last year and billing is chaos. Where would you start?+
With the pipeline, not the migration. Each acquisition keeps its dispatch and billing running while one reporting and billing layer reads them all. That gets the platform team one number per customer and one invoice format now. System consolidation then happens on a schedule you choose, rather than under billing pressure. Roll-ups are where this work pays fastest.
06What would you need to see before quoting?+
Scoping calls are free. One week of route data answers most of it: dispatch records, driver sheets, that week's invoices, and scale tickets if you run one. That shows the leak size and the systems in play. Where the honest answer requires reading an existing codebase, a paid two-week diagnostic runs first and ends in a fixed price.
Go deeper
- TankAware case study →Paper field records replaced across hundreds of sites.
- Field service software development →The wider field-service problem: proof, dispatch and the phone.
- Business process automation →Automation that runs unattended, on your own infrastructure.
- Automations fail silently →Why a billing pipeline needs monitoring, not hope.
