Most of the effort in council waste reporting happens before a single figure is published. Collection data arrives each month, from a contractor or Council’s own crews, transfer stations record what crosses the weighbridge, and the customer request system logs missed bins and dumped rubbish. Someone has to bring those together, check them and decide which numbers can be trusted.
In a small council, that someone is usually a waste officer with plenty of other duties. The checking is done by hand, often late in the month, and questions come to light when a report is due rather than while the records are fresh.
Since 2021, we have done that checking each month for Colac Otway Shire, so Council’s waste team and its collection contractor work from one checked set of figures.
The monthly summary a waste officer sees first: tonnes by stream against last year, filtered by year and collection day.
A demonstration dashboard for a fictional council, using illustrative figures.
What a monthly cycle looks like
- Collect. Contractor invoices or crew run sheets, haulage reports, weighbridge data and customer requests arrive in the formats Council already receives. Nobody retypes anything.
- Check. Collection runs, loads and invoices are reconciled, so collection records, weighbridge tickets and processor invoices line up. Anything out of pattern is noted for a quick conversation.
- Work through together. The waste team works through a short list of items to confirm, with the contractor where there is one, not a folder of spreadsheets.
- Publish. Once the figures are agreed, the dashboards update and the figures are ready for internal reporting and for the state.
Inbound and outbound tonnes by site and month, so everyone involved is looking at the same figures.
Demonstration dashboard, illustrative figures.
Why council waste reporting is getting harder
Victorian councils are presently mandated to offer a glass service by 1 July 2027 and food and garden organics by 2030. Each new stream brings another data file, another set of tonnages and another line in the state report. Checking by hand gets harder with every bin added.
Diversion and the share of each stream, month by month.
Demonstration dashboard, illustrative figures.
What changes for the waste team
The time goes into decisions rather than spreadsheets. Questions are sorted out in the month they arise, while the records are fresh, and everyone works from the same numbers. And when the state asks for figures, they have already been checked every month of the year.
Missed bins and other requests, and how quickly they are completed.
Demonstration dashboard, illustrative figures.
How we support council waste reporting
We set the data up once, then run the processing each month or quarter. Both are quoted upfront, so the cost is known for the budget year.
If your team spends more time checking figures than using them, I’d be glad to talk it through.
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