The check happened, but can you prove it?
A call comes in from a letting agent six weeks after a lockout. A tenant's former partner was let into a flat, and the agent wants to know what checks your engineer made. Your engineer is sure they checked. They always do. They looked at a driving licence and a bank letter. But the job sheet says "lockout, gained entry, new cylinder" and the photo, if there was one, is somewhere on a phone that has taken four hundred pictures since.
This is not a story about a careless engineer. It is about the gap between doing a check and having a record of it. Most locksmiths take their own occupancy checks seriously. Very few can pull up, weeks later, exactly what was seen on a given job.
Why the record goes missing
The check happens at the most awkward point in the job: at night, on a doorstep, after entry, with a relieved customer who wants to get inside and shut the door. Paper forms get wet or left in the van. Photos taken on a personal phone never make it to the office. And the job management system, if there is one, usually has a free text notes field and nothing that says "this is the occupancy check".
- The policy exists in the owner's head or a laminated sheet, not in the job workflow.
- Evidence is captured in different ways by different engineers.
- Photos stay on personal phones, mixed with family pictures.
- Nothing stops a lockout job being closed without the check being recorded.
- When the customer could not show anything on the night, there is no note of what the engineer decided and why.
What counts as enough is a decision for your business and your advisers, not for us. The problem we can solve is making whatever you decide get recorded, every time.
The risk sits in the jobs you cannot evidence
Most lockouts are exactly what they seem, and the record is never needed. The few that are not can arrive as a complaint, a police enquiry or a question from an insurer or letting agent. Without a record, the business has only an engineer's memory, and memory is weak evidence weeks later.
There is also a practical cost in the office. When someone does ask, it takes phone calls to engineers and scrolling through camera rolls to reconstruct a single job, often with no result.
The occupancy check becomes a step in the lockout job
We add the check to the job itself, in your existing job management system if it allows custom steps and photo fields, or in a small mobile job app if it does not.
- Lockout jobs carry a required occupancy check step, built from your own policy wording, so engineers see the same prompts every time.
- The engineer records what was shown, chosen from your list (for example a named document type, a utility bill at the address, a tenancy agreement), plus any notes.
- Photos, where your policy says to take them, are taken inside the job app and go straight to the job record, not the phone's gallery.
- If nothing acceptable could be shown, the engineer records what they decided and why, and the job is flagged for the office to review.
- A lockout job cannot be marked complete until the check step is filled in or the reason it was skipped is recorded.
- Records are stored with access limited to the people who need them and kept for the period your own retention policy sets.
| Question you might be asked | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| Who attended this lockout? | Engineer and timestamps on the job |
| What did they check? | The check step and its recorded option |
| Was anything photographed? | Photos stored on the job record |
| What happened if nothing could be shown? | The engineer's recorded decision and the office review note |
| How many lockouts last month had no check? | A simple report of flagged jobs |
Because these records include personal documents, we build the storage and access around data protection from the start and agree with you who can see them and how long they are kept.
Answering the question takes a minute
When an agent, insurer or officer asks about a job, the office opens it and reads the record. Engineers stop keeping evidence on their own phones. New engineers learn your policy from the prompts rather than from whoever trained them.
The owner can also see patterns: engineers who are regularly recording no check, times of night when checks are hardest, or job types where your policy wording is not working in practice. Those are conversations worth having before anything goes wrong.
Could you evidence last month's lockouts?
- Your occupancy policy is written down, but not built into how jobs are recorded.
- Evidence photos live on engineers' personal phones.
- Lockout job sheets rarely say what was checked.
- You would struggle to answer a question about a lockout from six weeks ago.
- Nothing stops a lockout job being closed without the check.