How to choose scrap metal dealer software: a 12-point evaluation checklist

Every scrap yard management system demos well. You will be shown a clean purchase screen, a dashboard with a rising line on it, and a nicely formatted report. Thirty minutes later, every option on your shortlist looks like every other one.

The differences show up later — on a Saturday morning with eleven people in the yard, when the network is unreliable and a buyer types a weight wrong. These are the twelve questions we would ask before signing anything.

1. How many keystrokes is a typical purchase?

Count them. Have someone log a three-line purchase — copper, aluminium, steel — while you count the clicks and keystrokes. Anything that needs a mouse for a routine action will slow the counter down every single transaction.

A good system lets a buyer complete a common purchase without leaving the keyboard.

2. What happens when two people buy at once?

Ask directly: how are reference numbers assigned? Many systems built for a single desktop read the highest existing number and add one — which under two concurrent users produces duplicates or collisions. It is an unglamorous question that predicts a whole class of future pain.

3. Can you correct a mistake, and can you prove you did?

Mistakes are certain. What matters is whether the correction leaves a trail. You want to be able to answer: who changed this record, when, and what did it say before?

Systems that let a manager overwrite history are a liability under every European traceability regime. Ask to see the audit log — not a slide about it, the actual screen.

4. Who is allowed to do what?

A counter clerk should be able to log purchases. They should probably not be able to delete last month's, change pricing, or export the customer list. Ask what roles exist out of the box and whether the edit window for a clerk is time-limited.

5. Does inventory update itself?

If on-hand weight by material is a report someone assembles rather than a number the system already knows, you have bought a ticket printer, not an inventory system.

6. What does the paperwork look like, and can you change it?

You need seller receipts and remittance documents that carry your identity, not the vendor's default template. Ask whether branding is configurable, whether you can supply your own layout, and — critically — whether documents are regenerated from live data or stored as flat files that drift out of date.

7. How does it handle WEEE separately from metal?

Electronic waste is a different regulatory animal with different categories. If the system treats WEEE as just another material line, your reporting will not separate cleanly when someone asks it to. We wrote about this in more depth here.

8. Can a regulator's question be answered in minutes?

Pick a real scenario: show me every purchase of a given material from a given seller in a given quarter, with weights and payment records. Time it during the demo. If the answer involves exporting to a spreadsheet and filtering by hand, that is your answer.

9. Where does the data live, and can you get it out?

Ask for the region the data is hosted in — for EU operators handling personal data such as ID numbers and vehicle registrations, this is a GDPR question, not a preference. Then ask how you export everything if you leave. A vendor who cannot answer the second question quickly is telling you something.

10. What happens when the connection drops?

Yards are not offices. Ask what a buyer sees when connectivity fails mid-transaction, and what happens to a purchase that was half-entered.

11. What is the real cost at your size?

Per-yard, per-user, per-transaction and per-module pricing produce wildly different bills at scale. Model it at your actual headcount and volume, including a second location if that is plausible within two years. Ask what the setup fee is and what onboarding actually includes.

12. How long until a new buyer is productive?

If training a new counter clerk takes more than an afternoon, the system will be worked around. Software that gets worked around produces exactly the incomplete records you bought it to avoid.

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The short version

Most of these twelve questions are really one question asked from different angles: does the system produce a complete, accurate, provable record of every transaction, without slowing the counter down?

Speed without records gives you a fast yard you cannot audit. Records without speed give you an auditable yard that people stop using by the second week. You need both, and there are fewer systems that manage both than the demos suggest.

SPiS is built for that middle: keyboard-fast at the counter, immutable audit history behind it, and reporting that reads the same records the paperwork does. See the feature detail or start free — one yard, no card required.