Waste transfers and duty of care

Waste Transfers sits under Compliance in the sidebar, beside Health & Safety, and the page is subtitled "Every hand-off of controlled waste, the note that proves it, and who was authorised to take it." Everything waste-shaped lives inside it, the setup included: a SIC code and an operating nation are fields printed on a note rather than application preferences, so filing them under general Settings would mean knowing they existed before you could go and look.

Opening the ledger

The first time you open Waste Transfers, the page is one thing: a form headed Opening your waste ledger, with the note it is setting up drawn beside it. There is no register, no chart and no buttons in the header, because nothing can be recorded until this is saved. The database refuses a collection from a company with no producer details, so an empty register beside three buttons that could only fail would be worse than not showing them.

Its subtitle is the whole reason it exists: "A waste transfer note is a legal record of handing waste to someone allowed to take it. Three answers set the header that goes on every note you sign."

The panel beside the form is the note header itself, on document paper, filling in line by line as you answer. Underneath it a status reads Header incomplete — nothing can be recorded yet until every answer is in, then Header complete. That status watches the whole header, not just the required half: answer "we sometimes take waste away ourselves" and leave the registration number blank and it stays incomplete, because the sheet above it would still say "Not set yet" against Carrier.

If you take waste away yourself

Answering We sometimes take waste away ourselves opens a worked example before it opens a form, because two things in that scenario catch people out and neither is guessable.

• That rubbish is commercial waste, not household. Anything collected in the course of your business counts as commercial even though it came out of somebody's home. Most council recycling centres will not accept it, so you normally need a licensed transfer station or a commercial waste site.
• Driving it makes you the carrier. That is what a waste carrier registration is for. Lower tier covers carrying only your own waste, which is the usual case for a cleaning company taking its own rubbish to a transfer station.
• You log one collection. What you took, which site it came from, and where you dropped it. You sign it, and there is no carrier to countersign because the carrier was you. Keep whatever the receiving site hands you, a weighbridge ticket or their own note: that is the other half of the paper trail and it stays outside CleanFlo.

Then the registration itself. There is a lookup first: type your company name or your registration number and CleanFlo checks the public register and fills in the rest. Or type the four fields by hand: Registration number (something like CBDU123456, on your certificate), Regulator, Tier and Expires. Leave the expiry blank if it does not expire: an England lower-tier registration does not.

The five tabs

Once setup is saved, the header grows a Log a collection button and a More waste actions menu holding New season ticket and Import a paper note. Below it, the area is five tabs, and the tab is in the address, so a copied link, a reload and the back button all land where you were.

Overview

Four attention tiles, then the period charts. It carries a badge when anything is outstanding, and it is the tab worth opening first.

Collections

The register: every collection ever logged, searchable and filterable, one row a note. Covered in Logging a waste collection.

Season tickets

One signed note covering up to twelve months of repeat collections, instead of a fresh note every week.

Carriers

Whoever takes your waste away, and whether their authorisation is current.

Setup

The three answers above, editable, plus your own carrier registration and any sites that sit in a different UK nation.

What needs attention

The Overview opens on four tiles. Each one is a number and a line of subtext, and each is a link into the thing it is counting. A tile at zero says so in its own words rather than going blank.

Awaiting the carrier

Notes you have signed and nobody has countersigned. At zero it reads "Every note is signed by both sides".

Open consignments

Hazardous loads whose Part E has not come back from the site that received them. At zero it reads "No consignee return outstanding".

Registrations to check

Carriers whose authorisation has lapsed, is close to expiring, or was never recorded. At zero it reads "Every carrier's authorisation is current".

Tickets to renew

Season tickets due inside the next 30 days. Its subtext is the warning: "Collections stop when one lapses".

A rejected consignment gets its own line under the tiles rather than a tile of its own, because it outranks everything: "1 consignment was rejected on arrival and needs dealing with." It is a link into that row.

Under the tiles the period charts read the last 12 months by default. Collections by month, what the waste was, who took it, how much moved, and whose waste it was. Two of those carry a sentence worth reading. How much moved totals per unit and never across them, because skips, sacks and kilograms are not the same measurement and there is no honest grand total to show. And Whose waste it was notes that a collection tied to a client is the one that client sees in their own portal, and the one that goes into their compliance pack at tender time.

Carriers, and whether they are allowed

The Carriers tab is whoever takes your waste away. A carrier is a name, what kind of operator they are, a contact, and the thing that matters: their registration number and when it expires. That number is what a note shows as the authority the waste was carried under.

For an England registration you can look it up rather than type it. CleanFlo checks the public register and fills in the number, the tier and the expiry from what it finds. Where the register has nothing to say, CleanFlo says that rather than guessing: a carrier with no registration on file is counted in Registrations to check and reads as unverified on every note it appears on.

A carrier you no longer use is marked No longer in use rather than deleted, and drops out of the list unless you tick the box to show them. Every note they ever signed keeps their details exactly as they were on the day, because a note is a record of what was true then, not a live lookup.

Season tickets

For waste you hand to the same carrier again and again, the law does not need a fresh note every week. One signed note, called a season ticket here and an annual transfer note elsewhere, covers up to twelve months of collections of the same waste to the same carrier. It is set up from More waste actions → New season ticket.

A ticket is a row in the register with the waste it covers, its EWC code, the carrier, the dates it runs between, and its renewal state. An expired ticket is not a warning, it is a stop: collections logged against it are refused, and the row says so.

Switching it off, and why it is different

Waste Transfers is a module like Equipment or Expenses, with its own switch on Modules under Account. It behaves differently from every other one, and deliberately.

Every other module disappears from the sidebar when it is switched off. This one does not. The screen stays reachable and opens as a read-only archive: everything already logged is fully readable, and nothing new can be recorded. A regulator can ask for a transfer note years after the toggle was flipped, and a record you cannot produce is not a record at all.