Safety Inspection Checklist

What this tool does

CM8-39 turns a walk round the site into a number you can defend and a list of actions you can chase. You record one row for every checklist item you looked at — where it was, what the standard is, whether it was met, what you saw, and what has to be done about it. The tool works out a weighted compliance score, ranks your areas and categories, tracks every non-conformance through to close-out, and prints a report.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so the names of the people responsible and the state of your site never leave the computer you are using.

Writing a checklist item

An item has to be answerable with "met" or "not met" by somebody who was not with you. Topics are not answerable. "Fire" is a topic; "Fire extinguishers in place, sealed and within their service date" is an item. "Housekeeping" is a topic; "Marked walkways kept clear to their full width" is an item.

Keep the wording identical from one inspection to the next. The tool matches nothing automatically, but you will read the register yourself, and an item that is worded the same way every time is the only way to see that the same walkway has now failed three visits running. Put the specifics in the observation field, not in the item.

The four results

• Result — Use it when — Effect on the score
• Compliant — The standard was met at the time you looked — Full points
• Minor non-conformance — The standard was not met, but work could safely continue — Loses one point
• Major non-conformance — Immediate risk of harm, or a systemic failure of a control — Loses every point
• Not applicable — The thing genuinely was not present or not in use — Excluded entirely

The line between minor and major is a judgement, and it is the judgement that moves your score most. A useful test: would you be willing to leave the area as it is until the next scheduled inspection? If not, it is major.

The tool insists that every non-conformance carries an action and a status, and that a not-applicable item carries neither. Those two rules stop the two errors that quietly ruin an inspection record: failures logged with nothing to fix them, and items parked as "not applicable" while an action sits against them.

How the score is worked out

Each scored item is worth the same number of points, set by the weighting on the Settings tab. Call it W. The item earns:

The score is then simply the points you earned as a share of the points that were available:

The Summary by area table prints both figures for every area and for the whole inspection, so anyone can check the arithmetic without trusting the tool. The Score column in the register shows each item's own contribution as "earned / available".

Weighting a major against a minor

The weighting answers one question: how many minor non-conformances does one major cost you? Set it to 3, the default, and each item is worth 3 points — a minor loses 1 of them, a major loses all 3. So one major does exactly as much damage to the score as three minors, which is what the setting says on the tin.

Worked example. Twenty items checked, of which two were not applicable. Of the eighteen scored, fifteen were compliant, two were minor and one was major:

Raise the weighting to 5 and the same inspection scores 100 × ((15×5)+(2×4)+0) ÷ (5×18) = 83 ÷ 90 = 92.2 %. That may look wrong at first — a heavier penalty producing a higher score — but it is arithmetic, not a bug: raising W raises the value of every compliant item as well as the cost of a major, and here fifteen items were compliant. The weighting changes the balance between minors and majors, not the absolute severity of the result. Choose one weighting, write it on the report, and leave it alone.

Not applicable, excluded twice

This is the single easiest thing to get wrong in an inspection score, so the tool is deliberate about it. A not-applicable item is removed from the points earned and from the points available. It is not a free pass and it is not a failure — it is not there at all.

The wrong alternative, counting a not-applicable item as compliant, flatters every score: check twenty items, mark ten as not applicable and get the remaining ten right, and you would score 100 % on the strength of ten items you never assessed. The other wrong alternative, counting it as a failure, punishes you for a checklist that covers equipment you do not own.

Use it honestly. If a machine was isolated for an overhaul on the day, that is genuinely not applicable and the observation field should say so and say when to re-check it. If you simply ran out of time, the item was not inspected, and the truthful thing to do is leave it off the register altogether and note the gap in the report.

Comparing one score with another

A compliance score is a measure of your checklist, not of your site. Two numbers are only comparable if they came from the same checklist, graded to the same standard, at the same weighting.

Checklist length matters more than people expect. On an 11-item checklist at the default weighting, one major non-conformance costs 3 of 33 points — nine percentage points — so a single finding drops you from 100 % to 90.9 %. On a 60-item checklist the same finding costs 1.7 points. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. Short checklists produce volatile scores, so read the direction of travel over several inspections rather than any single figure, and never benchmark a short checklist against a long one.

Closing non-conformances out

A finding that has no owner and no date is a finding that will still be there next time. Every non-conformance needs an action written as something a named person can do, an owner who is a person rather than a department, and a target date. When it is done, set the status to closed and enter the date closed — the tool then works out how long it took:

Close an action only when you have seen the fix, not when somebody says it is done. That is what the date closed records, and it is what makes the "Days open" figure worth quoting.

Compliant items can carry an action too — an improvement you noticed while the standard was still met. Those count in the open actions tile but never affect the score.

Overdue, due soon and no target date

The Action column in the register and the Open non-conformances table share one set of rules:

• Overdue — the target date has passed and the status is still open or in progress.
• Due soon — the target date is inside the window you set on the Settings tab, seven days by default.
• No target date — flagged in red, because an action with no date cannot be late and so never appears on anybody's list. It is not counted as overdue; it is counted separately in the Overdue actions tile so it cannot hide.
• Scheduled — dated, and further away than the due-soon window.

The table sorts by target date with undated actions last, which is the order you want when you are working through the list rather than reading it.

Areas and the minimum item count

Every row carries an area, and the tool scores each area separately so you can see where the problems are concentrated. An area with very few scored items cannot produce a meaningful percentage. With two items scored at a weighting of 3 there are only six possible answers, and a single minor non-conformance takes the area from 100 % to 83.3 % while a single major takes it to 50 %. Neither number is a measurement of anything.

So the chart leaves out any area with fewer scored items than the minimum on the Settings tab, and the summary table shows a dash for its compliance with the reason next to it. The items still count towards the overall score — they are only too thin to be reported on their own.

The trend line and your target

The trend chart plots one point per calendar month, using the inspection date:

A month in which every item was not applicable is skipped rather than drawn as zero, because a month with nothing scored is not a month with a score of nothing. The dashed line is the target from the Settings tab.

Read the trend, not the points. Three inspections is a picture; one is an anecdote. If the line moves sharply, check first whether the checklist or the inspector changed — that explains more sudden movements than the site does.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell you what to inspect. The checklist is yours, and a high score on a checklist that misses your real hazards is worse than no score at all, because it is reassuring.

It cannot check your grading. If a major is recorded as a minor, the tool will happily print a better number. It cannot tell whether an action actually fixed anything — only that somebody entered a date. And it does not weight items by risk: at a given weighting, a blocked fire exit and a missing sign are both worth the same points if they are graded the same way. If some items matter far more than others, either grade them accordingly or run them as a separate checklist with its own score.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, the six headline figures, all four charts, the open non-conformance list, the summary by area, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as a full inspection, and state the weighting you used — a score without its weighting cannot be interpreted.

Saving your work

Items, 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.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. The compliance score is a function of your checklist, your grading and your weighting — change any one of them and the number changes without anything on site changing at all. Quote it with its basis or not at all.

What must be inspected, how often, by whom, what competence the inspector needs and how long records must be kept differ by country and by industry. This is an internal record-keeping and scoring aid, not legal advice, not a regulatory submission, and not a substitute for a competent inspection.