Batsford Systems isn't a platform looking for verticals. It's a company that sits with an operator, learns how the work actually moves through the yard, and builds the system of record they should have had all along.
These four are where we started — but the pattern is what we build for, not the sector. A fleet or a scale, a schedule that changes daily, a regulator that wants an annual account of everything that moved: wherever that shape shows up and the software industry skipped it, the method is the same. Tally is the first system to come out of it, not the last.
Containers delivered, swapped and pulled across a county; every load classified to a waste category the state defines; a recycling center weighing material in and out all day.
The paperwork: weigh tickets, hauler-permit logs, the facility annual report, the NYS Part 364 collection form.
Twenty- and forty-yard cans on standing weekly service and one-off calls. The hard question is never "can we haul it" — it's "which box is free, and where is it sitting right now."
The paperwork: delivery sheets, run sheets, per-container tasks, trucking and fuel-surcharge lines.
Material sold and received by weight, with the gross-ton / short-ton distinction that trips up every generic tool. Every figure has to be labelled in its own unit or the money is wrong.
The paperwork: scale tickets, seller and buyer receipts, monthly in/out tallies.
Buying over the counter at the day's grade prices, with a seller-ID law that can't be left to memory, and a running inventory ledger behind it.
The paperwork: buy tickets, priced grades, seller identification, payout at weight × price.
None of this is a failure of the operation. It's a capable business doing the only thing available: a whiteboard for the plan, a spreadsheet for the numbers, and a bin of tickets for the state. Here is what each of those becomes inside one system.
There is no discovery deck and no six-month build in the dark. The work starts on the yard and stays close to it, and something usable is in front of the operator within weeks, not quarters.
Time at the scale, in the dispatch chair and in the cab. What gets written down, what gets remembered, where the same number is entered twice.
Gross ton vs short ton, demo loads, direct-to-landfill, swap vs relocate, the exact DEC categories. The data model matches how the operator talks.
Usually the dispatch board or the scale. It has to survive a real day before anything else gets built on top of it.
A stable release ships most weeks. Feedback from Monday is often deployed by Friday, and every customer upgrades at once.
The reason this works isn't speed for its own sake. It's that the rules of these trades are specific and unwritten, and the only way to get them right is to be standing next to someone when they explain why this load is billed at the end and that one per pickup. A generic tool asks the operator to bend their work to fit its assumptions. We do the opposite.
A capable operation held together by a whiteboard, a stack of duplicate forms and one person who knows how the software really works. The pattern is everywhere. The answer is not a bigger ERP.
It also means the software stays legible. There's one product, one database, one release train. When something needs explaining, there's a person who wrote it — not a support tier.
A problem that halts the operation is not a ticket in a queue. It's a call answered by the person who built the thing, and a fix that jumps ahead of whatever feature work was planned that week.
There's one release train. Feature updates land server-side, so nobody reinstalls a client, and there's no matrix of customers on old versions to support. A fix made for one yard is deployed to all of them.
Windows changes. SQL Server changes. The DEC revises its forms. The perpetual license pays for what exists today; the monthly subscription is what keeps a person responsible for that software still working three years from now.
Batsford Systems is small, and for now that means a short list of people who know the code deeply. A source-escrow arrangement — so a customer isn't stranded if the company disappears — is on the table and being worked out in writing. It isn't signed yet, and we won't pretend otherwise.
If the shape fits — a fleet, a scale, a route that changes daily, a regulator at the end of it — we'll show you what one system looks like on your own data.