Certificate & Test Record Register

What this tool does

CM8-193 is a register of the certificates and test records your business issues: electrical condition reports, gas safety records, pressure test reports, thorough examinations of lifting equipment, alarm commissioning certificates, emergency lighting inspections, appliance testing — whatever paperwork leaves your hands with a signature on it. You record each one as it is issued; the tool tracks which are coming up for retest or renewal, which have already expired, how often work fails, which follow-up jobs are still open, and which clients are still waiting for their copy.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so client names, addresses and defect details never leave the computer you are using.

Be clear about what the register is not. It is a record of documents you have issued — it is not the certificates themselves, and keeping it does not make anyone competent or registered to issue anything. The certificate is the legal document; this is the index that stops you losing track of them.

What to record

One row per certificate or test record issued. The fields that repay care:

• Certificate number — the number printed on the document itself. If your pads or software already number certificates, use that number; the register is then a straight index into your filing.
• Type — free text, because certification regimes differ by country and by trade. The one discipline that matters: use identical wording for identical documents. "Gas safety record" entered three different ways becomes three bars on the by-type chart instead of one.
• Site or client — the person or business you invoice. The address field holds the property, which for landlords and agents is usually different from the client.
• Engineer or issuer — who did the work and signed. If a signature is ever questioned, this is the column you will search.
• Expiry or next test due — the date the certificate lapses or the retest falls due. Leave it blank for documents that genuinely do not expire, such as commissioning or installation certificates. A blank expiry keeps the row out of every expiry figure rather than polluting them with a made-up date.
• Invoice value — optional, but filling it in turns the register into a picture of what certification work is worth to the business.

Results, and what they mean

The result field has four values, and the distinction matters because it feeds the failure rate:

• Pass / satisfactory — the installation or equipment met the standard tested against.
• Pass with observations — satisfactory overall, with improvements recommended but not required. On an electrical report these are typically the lower-code observations; on other documents, advisory notes. It still counts as a pass.
• Fail / unsatisfactory — the document records that the installation or equipment did not meet the standard. This is the result that should normally travel with a follow-up flag.
• Advisory only — a document that gives no pass/fail judgement at all: a visual advisory, a condition survey, a quotation inspection. These are excluded from the failure rate, because counting them as passes would flatter the figure and counting them as fails would damn it.

Expiry and retest tracking

For every row with an expiry date, the tool computes the days remaining:

Rows inside the warning window are marked due soon; rows past the date are marked expired. The window is yours to set on the Settings tab — 60 days by default, which gives most trades time to contact the client and book the revisit before the date arrives. Rows with no expiry date show "—" and are simply outside the system: they appear in no expiry tile, no pipeline bar and no expiry table, and the tiles state how many rows carry a date so the basis is never hidden.

The expiry pipeline chart counts certificates falling due in each of the next twelve calendar months, including the current month. It is, in effect, your booked-in-advance work: every bar is revisits you can be phoning about now. Already-expired certificates are deliberately excluded from the pipeline — they are not upcoming work, they are overdue work, and they sit at the top of the expiry table instead, soonest first.

One honest caution: the tool knows the dates you entered, not the law. It cannot tell you what the correct interval for a given certificate is in your country — a record that should be annual but was entered with a five-year expiry will sit quietly "current" for four years too long. Set the expiry from the regime that actually applies to the document.

The failure rate

The failure rate tile is calculated as:

The denominator is every certificate in the current filter that carries a pass/fail judgement. Advisory-only records are excluded from both sides, and the tile states the exact counts — "2 fail of 10 with a pass/fail result" — so the basis is visible. With no pass/fail results at all the tile shows "—" rather than a number that means nothing.

Read the rate for what it is: a property of the installations you tested, not of your workmanship. A high failure rate on condition reports often means you are being called to older or neglected stock — which is exactly the work where a thorough inspection earns its fee. What the rate is genuinely useful for is spotting change: filter by month or by client and watch whether the proportion shifts. A client whose properties fail repeatedly is a conversation about planned remedial work, not a statistic.

Follow-up work

Tick follow-up work required whenever the visit found something that needs doing — a failed appliance, a defect coded for remedy, an item removed from service. The tool insists on a line of detail when the box is ticked, because "follow-up required" with no note is worthless by the time anyone reads it. When the remedial work is done (or the client declines it in writing), untick the box: the outstanding count is the list of loose ends, and it should trend to zero.

Follow-up flags are also money. Every outstanding follow-up is quoted-but-not-won work sitting in your own register; the tile is worth reading on the first of the month with the phone in your hand.

Copies to clients

A certificate that never reached the client might as well not exist — and in many regimes the duty holder is required to hold it. The copy issued checkbox records that the client actually has their document, and the tile counts the ones still waiting. Tick it when the certificate is handed over, posted or emailed, not when you intend to. If you send certificates with the invoice, the unticked rows are also, usefully, the uninvoiced jobs.

Working the register by client

The per-client summary groups the register by the site or client field: how many certificates, how many failures, what was invoiced, and the next expiry date to chase — sorted so the client with the soonest renewal is at the top. Clients whose next expiry has already passed are marked expired.

This table is the retention engine of a certification business. The cheapest job you will ever win is the renewal of one you did last year, and the difference between winning and losing it is usually whether anyone rang before the date passed. Keep the client field consistent — one spelling per client — and the summary stays truthful.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: headline tiles, the four charts, the expiry list, the per-client summary, the full register and your notes. Print to PDF to send it. The scope line under the title states the filter in force — clear the filters before issuing anything described as the complete register.

Filtering by result is often the most useful print: filter to fails, and the report becomes a remedial-work schedule; filter to a date range, and it becomes the period's issuing record.

Saving your work

Records, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine, or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Certificates often have to be producible years later, and this register holds personal data — names and addresses of clients and tenants. Keep exports somewhere backed up, and treat them as confidential.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a certificate was correctly issued, whether the result recorded matches the document, or whether the expiry interval is the one the applicable regime requires — and every figure on the Reports tab depends on those entries being right.

Keeping this register does not confer competence on anybody and does not replace membership of, or notification to, any statutory certification, registration or competent-person scheme. Which documents a business may issue, who may sign them, what intervals apply and how long records must be kept differ by country and by trade. This is an internal record-keeping and calculation aid — not legal advice, and not a substitute for the schemes and standards that govern your work.