The challenge
Restaurants and other food businesses produce used cooking oil that has to be collected and taken away. A collection company in Canada picks up that oil and pays businesses for it in credit. We built its used cooking oil collection software: a web portal for booking pickups and tracking the credit each business earns.
The brief was short. Businesses needed one place to ask for a pickup and see what they had earned. The collector needed those requests, and the credit that follows each collection, tied to the right business.
Short is not the same as easy. Every pickup is a small job with a customer and a location behind it, and the credit has to line up with what was actually collected. In any program that pays in credit, a customer who can't see their balance has to ask someone for it.
Oil collection also sits inside a bigger picture. Grease that goes down the drain causes trouble for city sewers, and collected oil is a feedstock for biofuel. A collector that keeps clear records for its customers is easier to deal with on both counts.
What we built
We built a single web portal that the collector and its business customers both use. Its scope is deliberately focused, and covers three things:
Pickup booking. A business requests a collection of used cooking oil through the portal.
Credit tracking. Each business sees the credit it has earned for the oil collected.
Credit records for the collector. The collector records the credit each business earns, against that business's account.
Because both sides work in the same portal, each booking and the credit earned from it sit under one customer account. It runs in a web browser, so a business can use it from whatever device is at hand.
How it works day to day
Take a restaurant manager whose oil container is getting full. They open the portal and request a collection. Later, they come back to the same place to check the credit their business has earned for the oil that was picked up.
On the collector's side, pickup requests and credit records sit together, business by business. The team can see which customers have asked for a collection and record the credit each one has earned, without keeping a separate list for each.
The result
Businesses book collections and see their credit in one place. The collector has its pickup requests and credit records together for each customer.
We haven't published figures on pickups, customers or time saved for this project, so we don't quote any here. What the portal provides is one record per business that links each pickup request to the credit earned from it.
What the research says
Customers expect service at any hour. Zendesk's CX Trends 2026 report found that 74% of consumers now expect customer service to be available 24/7 (Zendesk, customer service software). In a web portal, a restaurant can request a pickup or check its credit after closing time, without waiting for the collector's office to open.
Canadian businesses already work online. In Statistics Canada's survey of digital technology use, almost one in three Canadian businesses (32%) received e-commerce orders in 2023 (Statistics Canada). A pickup request in the portal works the same way: an online order the collector can act on.
Cloud tools lead the way. The same Statistics Canada survey found cloud computing was the technology Canadian businesses used most in 2023, at 48%, up 3 percentage points from 2021. A browser-based portal fits that habit, with nothing to install and the same account on any device.
Where AI fits next
The portal does not do any of this yet; treat these as ideas. Past collection volumes could suggest the next pickup date for each business. Route planning could group nearby pickups to cut driving time. A simple assistant could answer customers' questions about their credit balance.
Planning used cooking oil collection software?
A small portal still rests on a few decisions. Settle these four before you build:
How is credit worked out: by volume, by weight or at a rate that changes over time?
Who confirms what was collected, and when does the credit post to the account?
Do drivers need their own view now, or is the office view enough to start?
Which records might a customer, an auditor or a city inspector ask for later?
See how we approach web application development and workflow automation, read our take on web applications versus websites, or browse more of our projects.
You can find similar systems under operations and logistics.
