Essential safety measures inspection and annual report software
In Victoria, the owner of a building with essential safety measures must keep them maintained and prepare an annual essential safety measures report — covering exits, paths of travel, fire doors, emergency lighting, exit signs, extinguishers, hydrants, sprinklers and the rest of what is listed on the occupancy permit or maintenance determination. ESM consultants inspect the measures, collate the contractors’ service records and write the report a municipal building surveyor or fire brigade can ask to see.
Built for building owners running teams of roughly 3–50 inspectors.
Sample Annual ESM statement
An illustrative excerpt. The site, readings and findings are fictional; the layout is yours to set.
Annual ESM statement
Annual ESM report — measures schedule extract
- Building
- Fictional Warehouse, 3 Example Court (Class 7b)
- Period
- 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026
- Inspected
- 18 June 2026
| Measure | Maintenance evidence / inspection | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Exits and paths of travel | Clear; rear exit door obstructed by pallets | Status: Defect |
| Emergency lighting and exit signs | Six-monthly test records sighted | Status: Pass |
| Portable fire extinguishers | Serviced Dec 2025; 2 units missing tags | Status: Follow up |
| Fire hydrants | Annual flow test record not provided | Status: Records missing |
Fields captured on site
Your firm builds the form in-app, so these are a starting point rather than a fixed schema. Every field is captured on the device, with or without signal, and lands in the annual ESM statement where your template puts it.
Measures register
- Measure
- Source (occupancy permit / determination)
- Required frequency
- Responsible contractor
Per measure, per period
- Service records sighted (yes / no)
- Date of last service
- Inspector observation
- Status
- Photo
Defects
- Linked measure
- Description
- Rectified on the day
- Due date
Standards the report works to
- Building Regulations 2018 (Vic)Maintenance of essential safety measures
- Requires the owner to maintain the measures and prepare the annual essential safety measures report.
- AS 1851-2012Routine service of fire protection systems and equipment
- The maintenance standard most fire-related measures’ service records are checked against.
Load the standards you hold into your reference library and the drafted prose is written against them rather than against a general model.
How the annual ESM statement gets built
Capture it once, offline
Your firm builds the essential safety measures assessment form in-app — 25 field types, nesting repeatable groups, compound AND/OR visibility rules, reusable modules and calculated fields. Field capture works with no signal: jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio all queue in an idempotent outbox that only clears once the server confirms receipt.
Link it to your buildings, levels and tenancies
Enter buildings, levels and tenancies once, as a register. Every one of your elements, defects and cost lines then points at a stored row rather than a name somebody typed — and the links survive a disconnected device.
Render your own template
The annual ESM statement renders into the Word template you already use — your letterhead, your section order, your clause library — with conditionals, loops over repeats, composable sub-templates and photo grids.
Reviewed before it leaves
You write the review framework: a checklist of what a annual ESM statement must contain, plus the prose standards you would mark a junior against. Link it to a report template and it runs every time that template renders. Each finding comes back graded info, minor or major, quoting the sentence at fault, and a person accepts or dismisses every one.
Because the structured submission behind the report is held too, the review is a comparison rather than a proofread: The narrative calls the roof "fair"; the element register grades it C with a twelve-month cost line against it.
Checks a commercial property framework usually carries
- Every graded defect carries a cost band and a priority
- The make-good schedule and the narrative describe the same condition
- Access and DDA non-compliances cite the clause they fail
- Every photo referenced in the text exists and is captioned
Questions
- Can the measures list come from the occupancy permit once?
- Yes. Measures are a register on the building, entered once, and each annual inspection links to them, so the schedule in the report matches the permit every year.
- Can we record that a contractor’s record was not provided?
- Yes. Evidence sighted is a field per measure, so a missing record is captured as its own status rather than buried in a comment.
- Does it work outside Victoria?
- The form is yours, so the same approach works for other states’ fire safety statement or maintenance regimes; the measures and wording change, not the method.
What this is not
Worth knowing before you book a demo, so neither of us wastes the half hour.
- Not field-service dispatch. No timesheets, no parts, no inventory. Scheduling exists to get an inspector to a site.
- No signature capture. If your deliverable has to carry a signed sign-off on the artefact itself, this is not the tool yet.
- Field capture is what works offline — jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio. Reports, chat, scheduling and the inbox need a connection.
- No client portal. Reports go out as a file or a password-protected link.
Other commercial property work we cover
- NABERS energy auditsEnergy rating evidence pack
- Replacement cost assessmentsInsurance valuation report
- Roof condition surveysRoof survey report
- Signage condition auditsSignage register
- Sinking fund forecast inspectionsMaintenance forecast report
- Water efficiency auditsWater audit report
- Accessibility DDA auditsAccess audit report
- Annual facade inspectionsFacade condition report
Other disciplines
Rebuild your annual ESM statement in SurveyThanks
Bring the Word template you already send clients. If you are coming off another field-forms tool, a filled report can be uploaded, read field by field, and re-rendered into your template.