A certificate the customer never received
A customer is selling their house. Their buyer's solicitor asks for the certificate for the replacement windows fitted last year. The customer rings you. The office checks the scheme's portal and cannot find the job. It was never logged. The installer finished it on a busy Friday, the paperwork went into a tray, and the tray was cleared in a hurry at month end.
Now the job has to be logged late, and the customer has an anxious wait while their sale is held up.
Why notifications get missed
Logging an installation with a scheme such as FENSA or Certass is straightforward. The trouble is that it is a separate step, done on a separate website, at the end of a job, by whoever looks after admin.
- The trigger to notify is a job finishing, which the office hears about informally.
- Details such as the number of windows, doors and glazing information are copied from the job by hand.
- Jobs completed near month end or holidays are easily missed.
- Nobody has a list of completed jobs that have not yet been logged.
- Certificates issued by the scheme are not filed with the job.
What must be notified, and by when, is set by your scheme and the regulations. The tracking holds whatever your scheme requires, and does not interpret the rules for you.
What a missed notification costs
Customers need the certificate at stressful moments like a sale. A missing notification puts your standing with the scheme at risk and takes time to put right. Late logging can involve fees or extra steps, depending on the scheme. And the office loses time tracing jobs back through paper files.
Notification tracking we set up
- When the fitters mark an installation complete on their phone, a notification task is created for that job with the date.
- The task is pre-filled with the details your scheme asks for, taken from the job and the order: address, number and type of items, and any glazing details.
- The office logs it on the scheme's portal from the pre-filled details, or through an integration where one is available, and marks it done with the reference.
- A dashboard lists completed jobs not yet logged, sorted by how long ago they finished against the deadline you set.
- When the certificate is issued, it is filed on the job and sent to the customer with their handover documents.
- A monthly check compares completed jobs with logged ones, so nothing slips at month end.
| Job state | What the dashboard shows |
|---|---|
| Installed today | Task created, details pre-filled |
| Installed, not logged | Days since completion, against your deadline |
| Logged | Scheme reference recorded |
| Certificate issued | Filed and sent to customer |
What the office gains
Every completed job has a notification task, so nothing depends on memory. Details are copied from the job, not typed from paperwork. The office can see at a glance which jobs are still to be logged. And when a customer rings a year later, the certificate is on the job ready to send.
The dashboard is also useful at audit or inspection time. If your scheme asks about your process for logging installations, you can show every completed job, when it was logged and the reference, rather than working back through paperwork. That is not a promise about any inspection outcome, only a clearer record of what your business did and when it did it.
Is notification a weak spot?
- Notifications are logged from paperwork in a tray.
- Customers have asked for certificates you could not find.
- You cannot list jobs completed but not yet logged.
- Details are retyped onto the scheme's portal.
- Certificates are not filed against jobs.