Mandatory reporting to the Digital Waste Tracking Service began for receiving sites in England and Wales on 1 October 2026. Scotland and Northern Ireland follow in January 2027. A few weeks in, the day-to-day work has settled into a pattern, and it is less about the first submission than about everything that happens after it.
For a full overview of the system, see What is UK Digital Waste Tracking?. For readiness tips, check our Digital Waste Tracking Readiness Checklist.
The two-working-day window
Each load must be reported within two working days, starting the day after it is received. In practice that means problems need to be spotted and fixed quickly. A submission that fails on Friday and is not noticed until Tuesday is already late.
The answer is not more manual checking. It is making sure every submission’s status is visible, and that failures are surfaced to someone who can fix them the same day.
Rejected receipts
The service validates every receipt and rejects ones it cannot accept, with a reason. In our experience most rejections trace back to data at the gate: a missing detail, a code that does not fit the waste, a carrier record that needs correcting. Fix the record, resubmit — and then fix the gate process, so the same error does not come back next week.
Corrections after acceptance
Loads get re-weighed, EWC codes get corrected, a wrong customer gets picked. When a receipt has already been accepted, the correction needs to be sent as an update to that receipt, not as a new one, so the service’s records stay in step with yours.
Keep your own record of what was sent
Each accepted receipt gets a tracking ID from the service. Store it against the load, together with exactly what was submitted and when. The service does not offer software a way to read a receipt back by its tracking ID, so your own copy is the record you will rely on if a load is queried later.
WTNs and returns still apply
Digital reporting has not replaced waste transfer notes, consignment notes or permit returns. They continue alongside the service until further notice, so the aim is to produce all of them from one record rather than keying the same load in several times.
How Sentinel handles it
In Sentinel, each submission has a clear status: ready to send, submitted, rejected with the service’s reason, waiting to resend a correction, or fixed. Submissions run automatically on a schedule, and an administrator can start a run from the portal when needed — a run lock makes sure two runs never overlap. The tracking ID and the exact data sent are stored against every transaction.
If your first weeks of reporting have been harder than expected, get in touch — we’re happy to talk it through.