If you park trailers in a yard, at some point someone has asked "is trailer 4471 still here?" and nobody could answer without walking outside. A yard check is how you make that question answerable from a desk. This page gives you a free sheet to run one — printable, Excel, or CSV — and the routine that makes it worth doing.

01What a yard check is

A yard check is a physical count of the trailers in your yard. Someone walks every spot, writes down what is actually sitting there, and compares the result with what the yard log says should be there. It is the same idea as a cycle count in the warehouse, applied to the parking lot.

The point is not the sheet. The point is the difference between the sheet and the log. Every difference is a trailer that is about to be "lost": it is in the yard, but the office cannot find it because the information about where it is has drifted. A yard check catches that drift before a carrier calls about it.

02How often to run one

• Once per shift if you have more than about 40 spots, run more than one shift, or turn trailers over quickly. Drift compounds every time a trailer is moved and the move is not written down.
• Once a day for smaller yards with steady traffic. First thing in the morning works well, because the night shift is when moves go unrecorded.
• Always before an audit — customs, insurance, a customer's security review — and after any incident such as a broken seal or a trailer that was found in the wrong spot.

The right cadence is the one where the sheet rarely finds a surprise. If every check turns up three or four exceptions, check more often, and look at how moves are being recorded.

03The columns, and why each one is there

04The 10-minute routine

1. Print or open the sheet. Fill in site, date, shift, and who is walking. Rename the spot column to match your yard once; keep the walking order fixed after that.
2. Walk every spot in the same order. Do not go to the trailers you expect to find; go to the spots. An empty spot gets the word EMPTY, not a blank row. A blank row is indistinguishable from a skipped one.
3. Write what is physically there. Number from the door, carrier from the placard, loaded or empty from the seal and the doors, seal number as written on the seal. Never copy from the log — that is the thing you are checking.
4. Compare against the log. Four kinds of difference: trailer in the wrong spot, trailer in the yard but not in the log, trailer in the log but not found, and seal does not match. Each goes on the exceptions list with what you think happened.
5. Fix the system the same hour. Correct the log, then fill in "keyed into the system" and the time on the sheet. The check is not finished until the log matches the yard.

A 60-spot yard takes one person about ten minutes on foot once the order is familiar. Two people walking opposite ends and meeting in the middle halves it.

05The failure that makes the sheet useless

The most common failure is not a bad walk. It is a good walk that never makes it back into the log. The sheet is completed, clipped to the board, and the log is left exactly as wrong as it was. Two days later the same trailer is "lost" again and someone asks why the yard check did not catch it. It did. Nobody keyed it in.

That is why the template has a "keyed into the system" line and a time next to it, and why the exceptions tab has a "fixed in system?" column. Treat those two cells as the finish line. If the person walking is not the person who updates the log, the sheet has to change hands before the shift ends, every time. The second most common failure is skipping spots that "are always empty"; the day one is not, that is where the lost trailer is.

06Printable sheet

This is what prints when you press the button above (one landscape page, 24 rows; the Excel version carries 60). Your browser's print dialog can save it as a PDF.

When you outgrow the sheet

A paper yard check works until the yard is busy enough that the walk and the keying-in are two different jobs done by two different people, and one of them gets skipped. In Vantage the walk is the keying-in: scan the trailer number at each spot with the phone camera, and the app compares it to the yard list on the spot and shows the exceptions before you are back inside. If the sheet is working for you, keep using it. If you find yourself doing the same walk twice, that is the signal.

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