What does your transfer-note paperwork cost?
Move the three sliders to your own figures. The answer is your arithmetic, not our guess at your business, and the sums run in your browser.
Your figures
These start on round numbers. They’re somewhere to begin, not a figure we’ve measured across the industry.
How many waste transfer notes your crews come back with in a typical week.
The pass after the collection: typing the note up and chasing whatever came back missing.
Wages plus whatever you carry on top of them, per hour, for whoever does the paperwork.
What the paperwork costs today
- Office time a week
- 2.1 hours
- Office time a year (52 weeks)
- 108 hours
- What that costs you a year
- £1,625
Notes a week, times minutes a note, divided by 60 for hours, times 52 weeks, times your hourly figure. That is the whole calculation, and it runs in your browser. Each row is worked from your own three numbers rather than from the row above it, so a rounded week won’t always multiply out to exactly the year.
Email yourself this report
We'll send the three figures above and what they add up to, so you have them when you next look at what the paperwork costs. This is the only thing on the page that reaches us.
What this number is, and what it isn’t
It covers the office pass only, the work that happens once the lorry has gone. Typing a note up and filing it, or going back to a driver about a signature that never made it onto the pad.
It doesn’t count the minutes your driver spends filling the note in at the kerbside. That has to happen either way, on paper or on a phone, so counting it would flatter the answer.
It also assumes every note takes about the same amount of office time. Yours won’t. A messy one takes an afternoon and a clean one takes a minute, so read the total as the size of the job rather than a figure to the penny.
Why CarrierNote changes that half of it
On paper a transfer note usually gets written twice: once on the pad where the waste is, and again in the office afterwards. The second pass is the one this calculator is measuring.
CarrierNote makes the record on a phone at the kerbside instead. Whoever hands the load over signs on screen before the van moves, and the app checks the record against DEFRA’s rules there and then. The office sees the finished note from that moment, so there’s no evening spent typing it up from a pad.
Paper transfer notes are still perfectly legal, and this doesn’t change that. See how capture works, or put the yearly figure above next to what we charge.
Start on the free plan
CarrierNote is on the GOV.UK software provider list, connected to DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking service. Receiving sites are in scope from October 2026 and carriers from October 2027, and you can be recording to DEFRA's standard from your first load, whenever you start.