A missed collection is provable for about six hours and unprovable forever afterwards, which is why the entire design of this part is about the morning.
Key takeaways
Three buttons and an optional photo, at opening. Fifteen seconds.
The photograph carries the date, the bin and the fill level at once.
Most contracts have a 24 or 48 hour reporting window. Miss it and there is no claim.
Partial collections are common and need their own button.
Report on the day, then reconcile at invoice time. Two separate acts.
The morning check
Fig 1. The capture, top to bottom. The fill level in step four costs nothing extra on a morning when everything went fine, and it becomes the most valuable data in the system.
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The photograph is the case
A photograph of a full bin, taken at seven in the morning, timestamped, is a complete and unarguable piece of evidence. It shows the bin, the date, the fact that it was presented, and the fill level in one artefact that took four seconds to produce.
Nothing else you can do later comes close. A note saying ’general waste not collected’ written on a Tuesday is a claim; the same note with the photograph is a credit.
The window nobody knows about
Fig 2. How the chance of a credit collapses with time. The cliff between the second and third bars is a contractual clause, not a negotiation.
This single clause explains why businesses that are certain they are being let down recover almost nothing. Reporting at invoice time is outside the window in most contracts, so the contractor’s answer is procedurally correct and the money is gone.
Report immediately, reconcile later
These are two separate acts and conflating them is the mistake. The report goes to the contractor on the morning, through whatever channel the contract specifies, and it is about getting the bin emptied.
The reconciliation happens weeks later against the invoice, and it is about the money. The report is what makes the reconciliation possible; without a reference number from the day, the invoice conversation has nowhere to start.
Partial collections
The cases the two-button version misses
Three bins out, two emptied. Common, and it is a partial failure that gets reported as success.
Emptied but not returned — the bin ends up in the wrong place, or on the street, which is a separate problem with the local authority attached.
Collected but overflowing anyway, which is not a failure at all. It is the resize signal from Part 5 arriving early.
Contractor could not access — blocked by a delivery vehicle, gate locked. Legitimate, and it needs recording as such or it becomes a disputed credit.
Collected early or late, which matters only if it is chronic, and which the timestamps show without anybody keeping notes.
The access case is the one worth being scrupulous about. Recording your own failures honestly costs you a small number of credits and buys you a great deal of credibility when you dispute something the contractor got wrong.
One number a month
The reporting output is not a dashboard. It is one line: expected twenty-two, got twenty, two reported and referenced, credit expected. Anybody can read that in three seconds and it is enough to know whether to look further.