User guide
Keeping evidence
Decision records, the drill and refresher log, and annual reviews — what each is for, and why none of them can be edited afterwards.
For: Anyone who can see the premises · About 7 minutes to read
Three kinds of record, each answering a different question somebody might ask you.
| Record | The question it answers | When you add one |
|---|---|---|
| Decision record | Why did you do it that way? | Whenever the responsible person decides something — adopting procedures, moving an assembly point, choosing not to do something. |
| Drill & refresher log | Has anyone actually practised this? | After a walkthrough, a drill, a refresher session, or a review following an incident or near miss. |
| Annual review | Is it still right? | Once a year, or whenever something changes enough to warrant it. |
Decision records
A decision record has six parts, and the two that people under-use are the ones that make it worth keeping.
- When it was decided, and who decided it — a named person or body, e.g. Alan Whitfield, Chair of trustees.
- Who was present — Full trustee committee (6). This is what turns a note into a record of a meeting.
- Topic — what was being decided, in a few words.
- What was considered — the options weighed, advice taken, constraints, and anything rejected and why. This is the part that matters later.
- The decision — what was agreed, in a sentence or two.
Record the decisions not to do something too. "We considered a lockable gate on the side corridor and decided against it because it would block the fire route" is a better record than silence, and it is the kind of reasoning nobody can reconstruct two years later.
The drill and refresher log
Four kinds of entry, because they are genuinely different things:
- Walkthrough — talking it through on site, without evacuating anyone.
- Drill — actually practising it.
- Refresher session — going over the procedures with the people who would run them.
- Incident / near-miss review — looking at something that actually happened.
Log the date, who took part and what happened — including what did not work. A log in which every drill went perfectly is a log nobody believes. "The side door stuck and took two people to open" is the entry that makes the rest credible, and it is the one that gets the door fixed.
You can attach a photograph. It is stored privately, it is only visible to people in your organisation who can see that premises, and it is served through a signed link that expires.
Logging an incident or near-miss review also sends the organisation's owners an email prompting them to record the follow-up decision — usually within a day, because the job that sends it runs daily. The decision is the part that gets forgotten once the immediate problem has passed.
Annual reviews
A review records who did it, what was checked, the outcome, and anything deferred. Saving one schedules the next for a year later, and the premises shows as due from 30 days before that date.
The organisation's owners get one email reminder for each review date, sent when the review falls due within 30 days or is already overdue; members are not emailed. Reminders go only to an organisation whose paid plan is in force, which normally means a current subscription — though a one-off procedure pack never expires, so an organisation that has bought one keeps receiving them. Each reminder has a link at the foot that stops them for your own address; the other owners still get theirs. Section 6 of the Service Schedule lists every email the Service sends.
Why none of it can be edited
Decision records and drill logs cannot be changed or deleted once saved — by you, by an owner, or by us through the application. There is no edit button because there is no edit route: the database has no policy permitting it.
That is the whole value of the thing. A log anyone can quietly tidy up afterwards proves nothing, and a record that can be rewritten is not evidence of what you decided — it is evidence of what you currently wish you had decided.
So the correction is another entry, not an edit. If a decision was recorded wrongly, add a new record saying what was wrong and what the position actually is. The trail shows the mistake and the correction, which is exactly what an honest record looks like.
If something has to come out — a photograph of somebody who should not be in it, a phone number that should never have been typed — that is a request to us, handled under section 12 of the Privacy Policy and section 9 of the Service Schedule. It is done by hand, on your organisation's instruction, and recorded.
Getting it all out
The evidence pack export produces everything recorded for a premises in one document: the profile, the current procedures, every decision, every drill and every review. Download it as a PDF on its own, or as a ZIP file that adds the drill photographs.
Exports keep working after a subscription is cancelled. That is deliberate — writing records is a paid feature, reading your own records back is not. See Paying for it.