Skip tracking: the daily skip count, and what it's costing you

Every morning, someone walks the yard counting skips. For many skip hire businesses, it’s just part of the routine. A whiteboard gets updated, a spreadsheet changes or one person keeps the numbers in their head because everyone trusts them more than the system.

It leads to an odd situation. You have a GPS on every truck in the fleet, track every job, and still can’t say with confidence how many 8-yard skips you’ve actually got free to go out.

Why does skip counting happen in the first place?

It usually happens because the current software either doesn’t track container availability at all or can’t provide a reliable live picture of what’s actually available. Without that visibility, the only way to know is for somebody to walk the yard and count.

That counting is a real job too. It takes time, and is usually done by someone who already has other things to be getting on with. Every booking throughout the day depends on that count being right, and on the right person being there to keep it updated.

Then there is the risk of selling containers that don’t exist.

Without live stock information, the sales team is making decisions without knowing what will actually be available. Some operators admit to overbooking by twenty skips and then finding them from somewhere. That means searching the yard, moving containers around or making difficult phone calls to customers who already expected their delivery.

There’s a slower cost too, and it’s harder to see because nothing goes visibly wrong. Skips sit out on sites for weeks longer than anyone realises and rental income gets quietly written off. At the sharpest end, that same problem leads to buying more skips than the business actually needs, because nobody can prove what’s already sitting idle on a site somewhere. 

Before moving to Waste Logics, Jones Skips relied on manual stock counts because their previous system couldn’t provide a live view of container availability. Without that visibility, checking what was physically in the yard was the only way to avoid overbooking or committing to skips they didn’t have.

Do it for long enough and it stops looking like a workaround and starts looking like just the way things are done.

What should good skip tracking look like?

The answer is a system that makes the morning count unnecessary. A booking screen that shows a live forecast, rather than a static number, tells you what’s in the yard right now, what will be there by the end of today once today’s deliveries and collections have landed, and what’s genuinely available on the date a customer wants. 

For example, if somebody books a skip for next Tuesday, next Tuesday’s available stock immediately reduces by one. If there won’t be enough containers available, the booking can’t be made. Exchanges remain neutral because one container replaces another. It works whether skips are individually numbered or not.

The same thinking applies to containers that have quietly disappeared into current jobs. Rather than searching through paperwork or relying on memory, the planner can filter a map to show skips that are coming up to their job end date. Those customers can be contacted, collections arranged and the containers brought back into circulation. The system identifies the opportunity instead of waiting for somebody to remember it –  containers come back into the yard sooner, rental income isn’t lost to skips sitting idle on site, and businesses avoid buying stock they already own.

The bigger picture

If you’re still counting skips every morning, it might be time to ask why.

Or, if you’re looking at whether your current skip hire software is giving you the visibility you need, take a look at our skip hire software page to see how live container forecasting works in practice.