draw each building's footprint as an area on the map with a location tag, and capture each checkpoint as its own asset — every fire alarm call point, extinguisher, emergency light, and (for legionella temperature checks) each water outlet. Name each asset exactly as your existing paper log names it, because the asset's name becomes the task title the person in the field sees.
A town hall or pavilion carries a different inspection problem from a park: lots of small statutory checks on different frequencies — weekly fire doors and alarm points, monthly extinguishers, emergency lighting and legionella temperature checks, monthly plant checks if you have HVAC or lifts — plus multi-year items like the electrical installation report. The regime has to satisfy an external audience too: your fire risk assessor, your insurer, sometimes an auditor. Here are the approaches, from simplest to most rigorous.
Approach 1 — the Building Sweep (or Room Sweep)
One recurring inspection over the whole building — or, if you track individual rooms as their own assets, over each room — using the Building Sweep or Room Sweep checklist. This isn't a vague "general condition" tick: it's a proper walk-round, one question per physical item, in walkaround order — roof and external fabric, doors, windows, lighting, heating and ventilation, fire safety, security, cleanliness, and more (60 items on the Building Sweep, 34 on the Room Sweep). Each item is answered OK / N/A / a named fault, a fault raises a job automatically, and a single Overall Condition rating at the end updates the asset's own condition record — the closest match yet to a paper property-inspection form (room, fixture, condition, action), except the "action" is now a trackable job instead of a free-text note.
Seven spaces with their own kit get a tailored version instead of the general one, mapped automatically on the relevant asset type: Washroom, Kitchen, Office (and Meeting Room), Public Toilet, Sports Pavilion, Library, and Entertainment Venue Sweep. Each is the shared core walk-round plus the extra questions that space needs — cubicles and cisterns for a washroom, worktops and extraction for a kitchen, stage rigging for a venue.
Pros: quick to set up — it's already sitting in the "Select a checklist" dropdown on the relevant asset types, no build required — and genuinely itemised, not a generic tick.
Cons: still building-level by default, so "Town Hall" gets one inspection covering everything inside it rather than a separate entry per room; for that, use the Room Sweep on each room as its own asset instead. And checkpoint-level history for a specific fire extinguisher or call point still lives with Approach 2 below — a building's own task list doesn't currently roll up the tasks of the assets inside it, so a sweep on the building and checks on its contents live side by side, not nested.
Approach 2 — per-checkpoint routines, one per building per frequency
This is the shape that works for most councils once they're serious: group the building's checkpoints into one routine per frequency, with the standard checklist on each checkpoint type — Fire Door Check, Fire Alarm Check, Fire Extinguisher Check, Emergency Light Check, CO Alarm Check, and Water Outlet Check for legionella temperature checks. Bigger buildings with hose reels, sprinklers, hydrants, risers, or smoke vents get the same treatment — see the full Building Fire Safety Checklist for that extended set. As a taste of the granularity, the extinguisher check asks six things:
Fire Extinguisher Check: In place & accessible · Seal & tamper indicator · Signs of discharge or leak · Pressure gauge · Physical damage · Overall condition.
A worked example — Brackenhill Town Council's community hall:
- "Community Hall — weekly" routine: fire doors (Fire Door Check), alarm call points (Fire Alarm Check), water flush on the little-used outlets (Water Outlet Check). Ten minutes for the caretaker who's there anyway.
- "Community Hall — monthly" routine: extinguishers, emergency lights, CO alarm, legionella temperatures on all outlets, plus the water meter reading (Water Meter Reading) while they're at it.
Why per building rather than one big routine across all your buildings? Two practical reasons councils give: your fire risk assessor wants one building's records in one clean view, and access constraints differ per building (different keyholders, different days).
Pros: checkpoint-level evidence, cleanly organised for exactly the people who'll ask for it. Failures raise defects on the specific checkpoint.
Cons: the setup is only as good as your asset capture — each checkpoint has to exist as an asset first. Budget an hour per building with the mobile app.
If your building has plant — HVAC, gas, lifts, lightning protection
Bigger or newer buildings often carry mechanical and electrical plant a simple hall doesn't: air handling units, chillers and ventilation systems, gas meters and radiators, a passenger lift or hoist, a lightning protection system. These now have the same treatment as fire and water checkpoints — capture each as its own asset inside the building area, and add it to the appropriate frequency routine alongside your other checkpoints (Air Handling Unit Check, Gas Meter Check, Lift Check, Annual Lightning Protection System Check, and so on for each plant type you hold). See the Building Services and Plant Checklist for the full list. One gap for now: electrical fixtures (distribution boards, fixed wiring, RCDs) don't have a bespoke checklist yet — they sit on the Simple Checklist until that's built.
The multi-year layer (every approach needs this)
Whichever approach you take for weekly/monthly checks, schedule the low-frequency statutory and insurance items against the building as recurring tasks: the electrical installation condition report (EICR), fire risk assessment and its reviews, PAT testing, boiler and heating servicing, the annual Gas Safe check, LOLER thorough examination on any lift, periodic lightning protection testing, plus certificate renewals (waste exemption certificates, vehicle tax and MOT if you keep those here too). This is the planned preventative maintenance (PPM) layer — the checks that outlive whoever set them up, so scheduling them is what stops a five-year item disappearing with a staff change. See Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) in Civic.ly for how this works across buildings, vehicles, and equipment together.
Most are carried out by external contractors: the scheduled task is your prompt to book them, and the completed record (date, certificate photo, notes) is your evidence trail. Your monthly plant checks above don't replace this contractor testing — they're the visual/functional layer in between, so a fault gets caught long before the next statutory visit.
Producing evidence for an assessor or insurer
There's no compliance dashboard yet, so the operating model is: schedule everything, and treat overdue as your non-compliance signal. If a check isn't in Civic.ly, nothing will tell you it's not happening. When someone needs proof:
- An asset's Tasks tab is its audit view — every inspection, defect and job on that extinguisher or that building, dated and photographed.
- Filter the inspections list by checklist and each question becomes a column — "Pressure gauge: Charged", "Seal: Intact" — so the filtered view is the report; download the CSV to hand it to an external assessor.
- You can also give an assessor a direct link to a record, or their own scoped login.
How to choose
Start with one small building and its weekly + monthly checks only — ignore the annuals until the routine is actually running. Once one building works, copy the pattern. If your team is new to the app, a Building Sweep for the first month then per-checkpoint routines is a reasonable ramp; if an assessor visit is imminent, go straight to Approach 2 for that building.
Common questions
Q: Who should do these checks — grounds staff or office staff? A: Whoever is in the building anyway. The weekly fire-door walk is a five-minute job for a caretaker or venue manager with the mobile app; assign the routine's sub-tasks to them.
Q: What about cleaning schedules — same approach? A: Cleaning is jobs rather than inspections, but the structure rhymes: rooms or facilities as assets where accountability matters, task descriptions carrying the spec, and photo-on-completion where you need proof.
Q: Our fire risk assessment was done by a consultant — where does it go? A: Schedule its review date as a recurring task now, and when the report lands, its action items become defects and jobs against the specific assets it mentions.