Health and safety software
- What a year of assessing and reviewing costs
- 1,111
- Assessments in the set
- 26
- Hours to write the set from scratch
- 28.4
Every figure the worksheets return is worked from the figures you enter. Where this site names a legal duty or a definition it comes from a public document, cited under the tool it appears in, and nothing here is legal advice about your own workplace.
Health and safety software, for the firm that already writes its assessments rather than the one deciding whether to, is one question with a dull answer: where does the assessment go after it is signed. The writing does not change much between a template and a platform. What changes is whether the version revised when the process changed is the one people are working to, whether the assessment due in November is visible in October, and whether anyone can produce, two years later, the record of who wrote it and who was told. This page sets out what the file has to hold for those three questions to have answers, and what it costs to keep the records rather than the documents.
Open the Risk assessment form Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Size the programme before you buy software for it
Activities, minutes each, review cycle, changes forced out of cycle and the people every change has to reach: the free risk assessment form on this site puts those together and gives the year's hours and the year's cost side by side. A firm that knows those two figures buys differently to one that does not.
Put an author and a date on every record
Not a filename, a record: this assessment, of this activity, written by this person, on this date, at this version. A record with an author can be defended; a document called RA_final_v3 can only be argued about, and the argument happens at the worst possible moment.
Carry the review date on the record, not in a diary
Reviews slip because they are attached to nothing. When the date lives on the record, next month's work is a query rather than a recollection, and an assessment that lapsed when a process changed shows up as overdue rather than as nothing.
Keep who was told, with what changed
A revised assessment that has not reached the people exposed to the risk has changed nothing on the floor. Holding the version history and the briefing against the record is the difference between having assessed a risk and being able to show it.
What a safety manager asks before running the Health and safety software
What does health and safety software actually have to hold?
Four things per record and nothing clever: what it is, who wrote it, when, and when it falls due again. Add the link from an incident back to the assessment it affects and you have the whole product. Anything that holds documents without those five is a shared drive with a login on it.
Do I need this if one person writes all our assessments?
Probably not yet, and we would rather say so. One person with thirty assessments and a diary reminder is a working system until they are ill, leave, or the number doubles. The arithmetic changes when more than one person writes records or when reviews start being found late; the free worksheets on this site let you see where your firm sits before you spend anything.
Will it tell me whether my risk assessments are any good?
No, and be careful of anything that claims to. Whether an assessment is suitable and sufficient is a judgement about your workplace made by a competent person. What software can do is make sure the assessment exists, is current, is the version people are working to, and can be produced when somebody asks.
What does it cost?
Coshhvo Pro is £100 a month for the whole firm, billed monthly, however many people write your records, and you cancel it yourself from your account page. Both worksheets on this site stay free with no account whether or not you ever subscribe.
Will it keep your file, beyond the Health and safety software?
Tell us what you are responsible for and we will tell you whether Coshhvo fits, what it does not do, and what it would cost. A person who works on the product reads it.