Getting started

1. Create your account and your company workspace.
2. Confirm your email address.
3. Walk the guided setup.
4. Invite the rest of your team.
5. Record your first waste transfer note.

DEFRA’s Digital Waste Tracking service is not one of the five, and if you carry waste it is not something you need today. There is a section on it below, because it is the question everybody asks first.

Two words, used throughout. CarrierNote calls one load of waste changing hands a movement, and the paperwork for it a waste transfer note. One movement, one note. You will see both words on screen and they are two halves of the same thing.

• Your registered company name, and your waste carrier registration number. In England and Wales the Environment Agency issues it, and it is on your registration certificate and in the Agency’s public register. It starts CBDU for an upper-tier registration, so CBDU123456, or CBDL for a lower-tier one. Carrying other people’s waste as a business means you should hold the upper tier, so if yours starts CBDL it is worth checking with the Agency before anything else.
• A work email address you can pick mail up at.
• Your trading address, meaning the one you want printed on your notes as the carrier.
• A card, if you are going straight onto a paid plan. The free plan asks for nothing.

Sign up with your name, what your business does, your company name, a work email, and a password. You agree to the terms on the way through. Marketing email is a separate tick box and you can leave it alone.

The company-name box searches the Environment Agency’s public register of waste carriers. Pick your entry and it fills in your registered address, your registration number, and your tier, so you do not type them again. If it cannot find you, type your details in instead. Searching by registration number works even where a name search does not.

Which plan. Pick nothing and you land on Pilot, which is free and stays free. Nothing here is a trial, so nothing expires and no card is asked for. Pilot gives you 10 waste movements a calendar month, one admin login, and one crew login, and it sells no extra seats. Each collection is one movement, so a van doing six pickups in a day records six. A movement counts whether it produces a waste transfer note or a consignment note, so a hazardous load spends one of the ten just as a skip of rubble does. The admin login runs the account. The crew login captures notes on a phone, and the operator on your weighbridge needs the same one as the driver on your round.

That suits one van and somebody trying it out. If you run three or four and you are collecting every day, you will pass 10 movements inside the first week and a second person in the office cannot log in at all, so pick a paid plan at signup rather than finding out on the Wednesday. Every price is on the pricing page and is shown without VAT.

If you do run out of notes on Pilot, one thing stops, and that is recording a new one. The message says so and points at the plans; move up and you can carry on the same minute. Everything you have already recorded stays readable, exportable, signable, and sendable for as long as the law requires. Your own records are never held back over money.

Three things stay switched off until the address is confirmed, because none of them should be done by an account we cannot reach:

• Sending a movement to DEFRA under your registration.
• Sending a signing link, so the other party can sign on their own phone.
• Emailing a finished note to your customer.

If it has not arrived, look in your junk folder and then in your mail app’s category tabs. Still nothing? Email us at support@carriernote.co.uk and we will send another.

The guided setup fills that in one pass. It opens on its own the first time an office account signs in, and it is in the menu under your name afterwards, as Setup guide. What it asks for:

• Your business, meaning its name, its address, and the email addresses your paperwork is sent from. Those can be the same address you signed up with.
• What you do. Tick every one that applies: you carry waste if you move other people’s in your own vehicles, receive it if a permitted site of yours takes it in, produce it if it comes off your own premises, and broker it if you arrange collections other firms carry out. A skip yard that tips at somebody else’s station carries, and does not receive.
• Your carrier registration, printed on every note you carry.
• Your signature. It is yours, not the company’s, and each person signs their own, so a driver at the kerbside signs as themselves.
• Your logo and the look of your PDFs, your vehicles, the sites you tip at, and who gets a copy of a finished note.

You can skip any of it. A one-van business has no fleet list to keep, so that step is finished by leaving it. Nothing is lost if you stop halfway either, because each step saves as you leave it and the setup picks up where you stopped.

Everything the setup asks is also under Business settings in the menu under your name, so it is never the only way in. Some steps only appear for some businesses: tick nothing about receiving waste and you are not asked for a permitted site.

Two things about it surprise people:

• You never set somebody else’s password. The invitation carries a single-use link and they choose their own when they accept. It expires after a week, and you can send another.
• How many people you can add is set by your plan, not by permission. Office logins are for the people at a desk, admins included, and crew logins are for the ones capturing notes on a phone. Pilot is one of each and sells no more, so a second person at a desk means a paid plan. On a paid plan, whoever owns the account buys extra seats under Subscription in the same menu.

Open WTNs in the main menu and press New WTN. It is one scrolling page rather than a wizard, because the person filling it in is often standing at the back of a lorry.

What to have in front of you for the first one:

• Who you collected from, and the address it left.
• What the waste is, as an EWC code (the six-digit European Waste Catalogue number that says what a waste is). The box searches as you type and flags a code as hazardous; there is a fuller search under EWC codes in the main menu. Nothing fits? Pick the nearest code and put the detail in the description, which is what the catalogue’s “other” entries are for.
• How much of it there was, and what it was in.
• Where it is going, meaning the transfer station or other permitted site taking it. A permitted site is one holding an environmental permit to accept waste. Save the ones you use in the guided setup and they are a pick-list afterwards.
• A signature from each side. Yours is the one you saved in the setup. The other party can sign on your phone there and then, or you can send them a link and they sign on theirs.

Do you stop using the paper book? Only when you are ready to. A paper waste transfer note is still a lawful record, and it stays one through the whole changeover. Plenty of firms run both for a few weeks until the crews are used to the phone. The one thing not to do is record the same load in both and let the two disagree. Switching from paper covers the changeover, and what happens to the books you already hold, in more detail.

A note you record is a note we keep. Nobody deletes it, and it is held for at least 2 years from the date of transfer under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. A consignment note, the heavier version used for hazardous waste, is held for at least 3 years. Both sides of a handover have to be able to produce one if the Environment Agency, or your own regulator elsewhere in the UK, asks for it. You can export the lot at any time, and leaving us does not change that.

Digital Waste Tracking has opened for the sites that take waste in, and DEFRA issues the code a business needs to file to those sites rather than to the lorries. So if you carry waste and do not run a permitted site of your own, DEFRA will not issue you a code today and there is nothing for you to send. Open DWT hub in the main menu and it says exactly that, rather than asking you for something you cannot get.

Carrier movements follow the moment DEFRA opens that step, and there is nothing for you to install or switch on when it does. Your notes are already being recorded to the standard DEFRA will want. The date your business is bound by is on the key dates page, and what Digital Waste Tracking means for you covers the rest.

Do you take waste in at your own site as well? Then that half is open to you now. Tick Waste receiver under Business settings and the DWT hub’s filing tools appear, with the three DEFRA steps on a card: register your business on the government’s Digital Waste Tracking service, pay DEFRA £26 a year for the company, and paste the code DEFRA gives you into the hub. The £26 is a government charge for a government service and is nothing to do with what you pay us; DEFRA will not complete a record until it is paid. for receiving sites walks through what changes at the gate. We cannot sort out a DEFRA account for you, and their helpdesk is 03000 203 781, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm.

They are separate registrations with separate expiry dates, and letting either lapse costs you something different. Put both in the same diary.

• Your waste carrier registration, renewed with the Environment Agency. Once you save the number we check it against their register and re-check it nightly. You get an email 60, 30, and 7 days before it expires and a warning on your dashboard from 60 days out, both to whoever owns or administers the account rather than to your drivers.
• DEFRA’s £26 a year, if you take waste in and so hold a DEFRA account. That one gets no email from us, because DEFRA bills you and chases you itself. The DWT hub shows the date, warns you inside 30 days, and says plainly once it has passed.

Email support@carriernote.co.uk and we answer within one working day, usually sooner. Once you are signed in there is a help desk in the app as well, under Help & support in the menu under your name, and it keeps the whole thread in one place. Support & help lists every way to reach us.