Terms of service

Who this agreement is between

These are the terms you agree to when you use CarrierNote. The agreement is between your business and Red Tape Software Ltd, the company that runs it. We are registered in England and Wales under company number 17401331, and our registered office is 66 Paul Street, London, United Kingdom, EC2A 4NA. Below, "we" and "us" mean that company, and "you" means your business.

You accept these terms when you create an account. If you are signing up for a company, you are confirming that you are allowed to agree on its behalf.

We sell CarrierNote to businesses. These terms are written on that basis, so the extra rights a private buyer gets under consumer law do not apply here.

What the service does

CarrierNote is a web application for UK waste operators, both carriers and receiving sites. It captures digital waste movement records, checks them against the rules before anything is sent, keeps each record for the period the law sets, and sends movements to DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking service, the government system that waste movements have to be recorded on as each part of the mandate comes in. The dates are the government's: sites receiving waste come in from October 2026 in England and Wales and from January 2027 in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and carriers from October 2027.

The service is a tool to help you meet your obligations. It does not assume them for you. You stay responsible for your duty of care (the legal duty everyone in the waste chain has to handle waste properly and only pass it to someone allowed to take it), for your waste carrier registration, for what goes to DEFRA under your name, and for the accuracy of everything you enter. Nothing in the service is legal, tax, or environmental advice.

Your account

• Give us accurate account details and keep them up to date.
• Everyone who uses the service needs their own login. Sharing one between people is not allowed, and it makes the audit trail on your own records worth less.
• Keep your passwords to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for the people you invite into it.
• Tell us as soon as you can if you think someone has got into your account who should not have.

Notices from us go to everyone on your account with Account access, which is what your Team page calls the setting: the people who can manage your team, your plan and your billing. That covers everything in these terms that says we will email you, and everything our data processing agreement says we will tell you.

We would rather a notice did not sit in one person's inbox. On a plan that includes more than one person with Account access, give it to a second person. Pilot includes one, and a paid plan is what buys another, so the other way is an address more than one of you reads, such as an office or admin address. That is allowed for this: a shared address may hold Account access so that notices reach whoever is in. Everything else still needs a personal login, because a record signed by a mailbox tells an inspector less than one signed by a person.

If the only person with Account access has left, email us. We will put somebody else on it once we have checked with the business that they should have it, so an account is never stranded because one person walked out of it.

How many logins you get depends on your plan. Pilot, the free one, comes with 1 admin login and 1 crew login. Paid plans include more of both, and most of them sell extra office and crew logins on top, priced by the month. What each plan includes, and what an extra login costs, is on our pricing page.

How you may use it

You agree not to:

• use the service unlawfully, or enter data you have no right to hold;
• try to reach another customer's data, take the software apart, overload it, or interfere with how it runs;
• enter records you know to be false or misleading, or use the service to get around a rule that applies to you.

If we think you have broken these rules we will tell you what we have seen and what needs to change before we do anything else. We may suspend an account that keeps breaking them, and end the agreement if the breach is serious or will not stop. A suspension never takes away your ability to sign in and read or export the records the law makes you keep.

While an account is suspended you cannot record anything new. Everything you have already recorded you can still read, export, sign, and send to DEFRA, the same as on any other day, because a load you have already handled is a duty of yours and stopping you meeting it would help nobody. Your subscription carries on as it is, so the payments do not stop. We will tell you what has to change and put the account back as soon as it has.

Your data, and the records the law makes you keep

The data you enter stays yours. We hold it and act on your instructions so that we can run the service for you, and we do not use your customers' data for our own purposes. What we do with personal data, and who else handles it, is set out in our privacy notice.

Where we handle personal data on your behalf, rather than for our own purposes, a second agreement covers how. You accept it when you accept these terms, so there is nothing extra to sign: our data processing agreement.

If these terms and that agreement ever say different things, these terms decide, with one exception: on how we handle personal data on your behalf, that agreement decides. It is the more detailed document on its own subject, and it is the one your own regulator will read.

Some of what the service holds is a statutory record, which means the law tells you how long to keep it and neither of us can shorten that. Waste transfer notes are kept for at least two years from the date of the transfer. Consignment notes, which are what hazardous waste moves under instead of a transfer note, are kept for at least three years from the date the load moved. Records that touch money are kept for six years from the end of the accounting period they fall in, because HMRC says so. Every one of those clocks runs from the record, not from your account, so they carry on whether or not you still have an account with us, and whether or not you have asked us to delete something.

Photographs attached to a waste movement are different. They are evidence you took, not a record the law makes you keep, so we hold them for seven years to outlast the note they belong to, and you can delete one from the app whenever you want to.

What you pay

What each plan costs, and what it includes, is published on our pricing page.

Every price we publish is stated without VAT, and VAT is added on top at the rate that applies when we bill you.

There is a free plan, called Pilot, and it stays free. It lets you record up to 10 waste movements each calendar month, and the count starts again on the 1st. One load is one movement, and it produces one note. A movement counts whether it produces a waste transfer note or a consignment note. Recording the movement is what spends the allowance, so correcting one afterwards costs you nothing, and a load you record in June counts against June even if it moved in May. Every paid plan records as many as you like.

Once you have recorded all 10 in a calendar month, the app stops you recording another one until the 1st, and it tells you the date on screen. The stop is on recording something new and on nothing else, so everything you have already recorded stays where it is, and you can still read it, export it, sign it, and send it to DEFRA. If you need more before the 1st, move to a paid plan and you can carry on the same day.

The stop lands when the note is saved, which can be at the roadside with a load already on the van. Nothing warns the driver earlier, because nothing knows earlier. Two ways to stay ahead of it: the count is on your dashboard from the day you start, and moving to a paid plan takes effect at once, so the note can be saved the same minute from the same screen. If you run more than 10 loads in a month, Pilot is not the plan for you and we would rather say so here than have you find out in a lay-by.

A paid plan renews on its own at the end of each billing period, and we take the payment from the card you have given us. Your next payment date is on the Subscription page inside the app, and your receipts and payment history are held by our payment provider, which that page links you straight into.

If we change what a plan costs, we will email everyone with Account access at least 30 days before the new price applies to you. The new price starts at your next renewal after that, so you always have a full period to decide. If you would rather not pay it, cancel before that renewal and you will not be charged the new amount.

If a payment fails

Cards expire and payments bounce, so a failed payment does not cut you off. Your account carries on at full service for 14 days while our payment provider retries the card and emails you about it.

If it is still unpaid after 14 days, your account moves to Pilot's allowance until the bill is settled. That means 10 waste movements a calendar month rather than the unlimited number your plan includes. It is that month's total and not a fresh ten: what you have already recorded since the 1st counts towards it, so if you have passed 10 already, your next 10 come on the 1st of next month. What it does not touch is everything else. Your subscription stays as it is, nobody loses a login, and everything you have already recorded stays where it is: you can still sign in, read it, export it, sign it, and send it to DEFRA. Your billing pages stay open so you can pay and put it right, and paying restores the plan you were on, with the same logins.

Cancelling, and refunds

You can cancel your subscription at any time from inside the app. Your plan keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, whether that is a month or a year, and we don't refund the unused part of it. On a monthly plan, dropping a seat, meaning one of the logins you pay for, or moving to a cheaper tier works the same way: the change takes effect at your next payment date, so nothing you have paid for is cut short.

On an annual plan we do more than that, because a year is a long time to wait. A seat you drop is released straight away, and the months you haven't used come off your next bill. Moving to a cheaper tier gives you the choice on screen: keep the plan you have paid for until your renewal date, or switch now and take the unused months off your next bill in the same way. Neither of those is a refund. The money stays on your account and comes off what you next owe, and nothing goes back to your card.

A credit like that waits for a bill to come off. If you cancel and go back to Pilot, Pilot costs nothing, so there is no bill and the credit sits where it is. It does not expire and it is not paid out in cash. Take a paid plan again, whenever that is, and it comes off that one.

We don't give refunds. If something has gone badly wrong we may decide to put money back as a goodwill gesture, but that is our decision each time and not something these terms give you.

There is one exception, and it is the only one. If we tell you a new company is going to start handling your data, you object, and we cannot find a way round it, you can cancel over it and we will pay back the unused part of what you have already paid. That is a refund to your card, not a credit. Tell us before the change takes effect, which is why that notice gives you 30 days. It is set out in our data processing agreement.

After you cancel, your account stays open, for as long as you want it. You go back to Pilot, which records 10 waste movements a calendar month, and you can pick a paid plan again whenever you like. Nobody loses a login: the people you already have keep theirs, and Pilot's 1 admin login and 1 crew login is what applies to any login you add after that. Everything you recorded before stays where it is, and you can still sign in and export it. We don't delete your waste transfer notes when you stop paying. The law makes you keep them for two years, and a record you are required to hold is not something we would withhold over a subscription.

Adding a login means adding a login, and replacing somebody who has left counts as adding one. The office logins and the crew logins are counted separately, so removing a crew login never frees an office one, or the other way round. You can add a login of one kind when you have fewer of that kind than your plan includes, counting what you have before the new one. Pilot includes 1 admin login and 1 crew login, so if you kept six crew logins through a cancellation you cannot add another until you are down to none of them, and removing the one person who left gets you no nearer. A crew login never uses an office one, even where that person also manages the account; an office login that manages the account has to fit the number of admins your plan includes as well. The people you have keep working as they are. If you need to bring somebody new in, that is the point to pick a paid plan again.

Cancelling and closing are two different things, and cancelling is the one you do in the app. It stops the payments and leaves your account open. Closing shuts the account for good, and you ask us to do that one. "Ending the agreement, and getting your data out", below, says what happens when you do.

DEFRA's software tests, and what they do not mean

DEFRA publishes test scenarios for software that sends records to Digital Waste Tracking. DEFRA does not review or mark anyone's results; each provider runs the tests and checks its own. We publish ours, scenario by scenario, including any we do not pass or support, on our DEFRA test results page, and we run them again whenever we change the service. If the service stops handling one of the scenarios, that page will say so, and what it means for what you can record.

DEFRA has issued us production credentials, which let the service send records to the live Digital Waste Tracking service. Those credentials are not DEFRA's assessment of the service. They do not confirm that it meets the Digital Waste Tracking regulations, and you cannot rely on them, or on our place on the GOV.UK list of software providers, as if they did.

If you run a site that receives waste, the legal duty to record each load you take in with DEFRA is yours, and so is the responsibility, including any penalty, if a record is wrong, late or missing, whatever the limits of the software you use. Choosing your software is your decision, and it is for you to satisfy yourself, using our test results and anything else you need, that the service records what your site has to.

Your DEFRA registration is yours

To put waste movements on Digital Waste Tracking, your business needs its own registration with DEFRA and has to pay DEFRA's charge for it, currently £26 a year for each business that creates or edits records. It is charged per company, not per vehicle or per person, so one registration covers your whole business. That charge is DEFRA's, not ours, and it is separate from what you pay us.

You pay DEFRA directly, DEFRA gives you a code, and you enter that code into CarrierNote. We never hold your DEFRA account and never pay the charge on your behalf. If your registration lapses, DEFRA stops accepting movements sent under your code, and there is nothing we can do at our end to keep them flowing. Recording is not affected. Your crew carry on capturing movements in the app exactly as before, the notes are produced as usual, and your records stay in the service throughout. What waits is the sending: a movement you could not send stays in the app, and you send it once your registration is back.

Support

Email us or use the help desk inside the app, and we will answer within one working day. That is the slowest we will be, not the average, and it counts working days rather than weekends and bank holidays. Today that target is the same on every plan. If we ever publish a faster one for a plan, it is on top of this and never instead of it.

Keeping the service running

We work to keep the service up, but we cannot promise it will never be unavailable. We carry out maintenance, and things outside our control (a hosting provider outage, a network fault) can take it offline. Where we can plan an interruption, we will tell you first. If one affects your records we email the people who manage your account. How we handle an incident is set out on our status page.

Who owns what

The CarrierNote software, its design, and its branding belong to us or to the people we license them from. Your subscription gives you a licence to use the service for your business for as long as these terms apply; it does not transfer ownership of any part of the software. The documents the service produces for you, such as your waste transfer notes and consignment notes, are yours.

What we are responsible for, and what we are not

Some liability cannot be limited by law, and we do not try to limit it: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, and anything else the law says must stand.

Beyond that, our responsibility for any claim arising from your use of the service is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim. We are not responsible for indirect or knock-on losses, including lost revenue, fines, or penalties from a regulator. Nor are we responsible for a penalty that follows from data you entered wrongly, or from an obligation of yours that the service was only helping with.

Ending the agreement, and getting your data out

You can stop using the service whenever you like. To close the account for good, ask us: email us or use the help desk inside the app. We confirm the closing date with you in writing before we do it. We may end the agreement ourselves if you break these terms seriously or repeatedly. We will not end it over an unpaid bill: an unpaid bill moves you to Pilot's allowance, as set out above, and you keep your records either way.

Ending it ourselves does not change what you get out. We tell you the date in writing before it happens, and from that date your account stays readable and exportable for the same 30 days a closure you asked for would give you. The retention periods above then run exactly as they always do. Your statutory records are not ours to withhold, whatever the argument was about.

Take your data with you before you go. You can download any waste transfer note or consignment note as a PDF, one at a time, and export all your waste movements as a spreadsheet file in one go. For anything beyond those two, ask us and we will put a copy together for you. It arrives as one download link and holds everything we still have for your account: your waste movements and your address book as CSV spreadsheet files, and every transfer note and consignment note as a PDF. Anything else you have entered comes with it in the same forms, a spreadsheet file where the data has rows and a PDF where it is a document. Photographs attached to your movements are the one thing not in it yet, so download any of those you want to keep before you go. We put the copy together by hand and send it as a link within the 10 working days named below. The link does not last for ever: if yours has stopped working by the time you get to it, ask and we will send another inside that same 10 working days, for as long as we still hold the records. That copy is everything on your account except those photographs. If one of your own customers asks you for their data alone, the "Export data" button on their record does that one person, and that download does carry their photographs as image files, which is why the two are described differently here. Our data processing agreement sets out what it holds.

A closed account stays readable for 30 days so you can still get at it. After that we delete everything the periods set out above do not cover. Those periods cover the statutory records and the photographs on your waste movements, and we hold both to the end of the period and do not keep them beyond it. While we are still holding a record of yours, you can ask us for a copy of it, and we will tell you within one working day how and when you will get it. You will have it within 10 working days of asking. We do not charge for that. Asking for your own records is support, so it gets the support answer. A question about how personal data is handled is a different thing, and our data processing agreement answers it in writing within 10 working days.

If we are sold, or we stop

We may transfer this agreement, and your account with it, to whoever buys the business or the part of it that runs CarrierNote. We will email everyone with Account access at least 30 days before it happens and tell you who is taking it on. This agreement and the data processing agreement carry over unchanged, and the buyer is bound by both.

A sale does not give you a right to object, because nothing about who handles your data changes on the day it happens: the buyer takes our place and inherits the same promises. If the new owner later wants to change who handles your data, or move it, that is a change to the sub-processor list and it gets its own notice and its own right to object, exactly as it would from us.

If we decide to stop running CarrierNote altogether, we will give you at least 30 days' notice, and export will keep working for the whole of that time. We would rather hand the service to somebody who will keep running it, and we will tell you if we do.

Everything above about how long we keep your records is a promise from a company that is still running. A wind-down is the one thing that can end it early, and we would rather say so than leave you to find out. So those 30 days are your window to get everything out, and they are the reason we tell you to keep your own copies rather than rely on ours. Your own duty to hold those records does not end because our service did, which is the whole reason this paragraph is here.

One thing we cannot promise. If the company were to become insolvent, an administrator takes those decisions rather than us, and we will not pretend otherwise here. That is a reason to keep your own copy of anything you are required to hold, whoever your supplier is. Export your waste movements as often as suits you, and you are covered whatever happens to us.

If we change these terms

We will change these terms from time to time. If we change them in a way that affects your rights or what you pay, we will email everyone with Account access at least 30 days before it takes effect, and say what has changed. Carrying on using the service after that means you accept the new version. If you would rather not, cancel before the change takes effect.

We do not decide on our own which of these changes you get to see. Every change we make to these terms is listed at the foot of this page, with the date we made it, whether or not we emailed you about it.

We keep a record of the wording you agreed to and when you agreed to it, and you can ask us for a copy of it at any time.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales deal with any dispute. That does not change the waste rules that apply where you operate. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own, and so, for hazardous waste, does Wales.

What the service does for every nation is use that nation's wording, cite that nation's statute on the note, and take that nation's consignment code format. Scotland calls hazardous waste "special waste", and its notes say so throughout.

Here is what it does not do, so you can plan around it rather than discover it. The list is what the software does not do today, read off the code rather than remembered. If you meet something that is not on it, tell us: either it belongs here and we will add it, or the service does do it and we will show you where.

• A movement is recorded under one nation. If a load crosses a border, the note carries the nation you chose and not both, so a cross-border movement needs your own eye on which rules you are meeting.
• The deadline the service counts for a movement is the end of the second working day after the day the load arrived, counted on the bank holidays of the nation the receiving site is in. It tells which nation that is from the site's permit number, then its postcode, then the nation the note is recorded under. So where a note has no permit number in a form the service recognises, and no postcode or one near a border, check that the note's nation is the site's. For a site in Scotland or Northern Ireland it counts no deadline for a load that arrived before 1 January 2027, or that was collected before then where no arrival is recorded.
• Pre-notification, the advance notice the Scottish rules ask for before some special waste moves, is not built in. SEPA, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, will tell you when it applies to you; sending it stays yours.
• We check a carrier registration against the public register for England and Wales, kept by the Environment Agency, and the one for Scotland, kept by SEPA. Two kinds we cannot confirm are real: a Scottish registration to carry only your own waste, which SEPA's register does not list, and a number from NIEA, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, which publishes no register we can read. Those are stored, printed and checked for the right shape.
• The only thing the service files for you is a waste movement to DEFRA. It files nothing to the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, SEPA or NIEA. The quarterly waste return it produces is a report for you to use, built on the Environment Agency's periods, and we do not send it anywhere.

Some of that is ours to build and some of it never could be. Holding a valid registration, sending a pre-notification, filing a return under your own name and keeping your own register are duties the law puts on you, and no software takes them off you. Nothing in that list is promised for a future release, so plan on what the service does today.

Questions

Anything here you would like explained, email support@carriernote.co.uk.

Changes to this document

Every change we have made to this document since the service opened is on this list, newest first, including the ones we judged too small to email about. Where we changed an answer the document had already given, the line says what it used to say; where we added something it had never said, the line says what it says now.