Dwellant Compliance: setup and best practice guide

Establishing a Digital Twin provides a single source of truth for physical building specs and statutory safety roles under the Building Safety Act.

• Estate & Block Hierarchy: Configure the overarching estate, individual blocks, and floor levels.

Why: Establishes the digital framework so assets, maintenance tasks, and statutory records are anchored to their exact physical location in the building.

• HRB Details: For Higher-Risk Buildings (HRBs), record building height, number of storeys, residential unit count, and registration numbers.

Why: Satisfies statutory Building Safety Act (BSA) reporting baselines and ensures the building's digital record contains mandatory compliance specifications.

• Accountability Roles: Assign Principal Accountable Persons (PAPs) and Competent Persons to specific blocks.

Why: Provides transparent regulatory accountability, ensuring clear ownership for building safety cases during official audits.

• Monthly Health & Safety Declarations: Enable the monthly H&S declaration prompt on the first of every month. If no incidents occurred, users log a clean confirmation, creating a verifiable audit trail.

Why: Creates a simultaneous audit trail proving ongoing safety oversight, allowing managers to demonstrate continuous compliance rather than reconstructing historical records retrospectively.

The Asset Register catalogues all statutory, life safety, and plant equipment.

• Asset Tree Breakdown: Visualise and maintain assets in a hierarchical tree view grouped by block and floor level (e.g., Lifts, Cold Water Storage Tanks, Dry Risers, Smoke Control).

Why: Prevents missed plant inspections by giving property teams a structured catalogue of every statutory and non-statutory asset on site.

• Asset Categorisation: Tag items by discipline (Life Safety, Electrical, Mechanical, Water Hygiene) to streamline filtering and bulk management.

Why: Enables bulk filtering, standardised reporting, and targeted routing of maintenance tasks to specialist trade contractors.

• Bulk Configuration & Templates: Apply pre-set property templates (e.g., standard residential block vs. housing estate) or download CSV templates for bulk upload when setting up large portfolios.

Why: Eliminates repetitive manual data entry during onboarding and standardises asset naming conventions across multi-building estates.

PMEs act as automated system triggers to ensure regular safety checks take place and generate maintenance requests.

• Template Association: Apply standard company PME templates to automatically populate event types, descriptions, and required categories.

Why: Mitigates operational risk by ensuring property managers apply approved, standardised scopes of work rather than drafting custom requests manually.

• Event Frequency & Schedule Types:
  • Fixed: Executes on hard calendar dates (e.g., every 6 months on 1st Jan and 1st July) regardless of when the prior event was closed.
  • Variable: Calculates the next due date dynamically based on the completion date of the previous check.

Why: Accommodates different regulatory inspection criteria—some regulations require fixed statutory calendar dates, while others depend on cyclical intervals since the last completed service.

• Daily Checks vs. Recurring Events: For daily checks, reopen and close a single rolling event rather than generating 365 standalone requests per year.

Why: Prevents system bloat and keeps work queues manageable by avoiding hundreds of redundant open/closed tickets.

• Lead Times & Mandatory Uploads: Define advance notice windows and tick Document Required to prevent event completion without a signed certificate or report.

Why: Ensures contractors receive adequate advance warning while preventing jobs from closing without an auditable inspection certificate.

• Permits to Work & Custom Sub-Forms: Attach custom forms (e.g., LOLER checklists, Hot Works permits) requiring mandatory completion by site staff or contractors prior to closure.

Why: Enforces safe working procedures on site and captures physical sign-offs directly inside the compliance event record.

• Resident Portal Visibility: Toggle whether scheduled event notices and completion certificates are visible to leaseholders on their portal feed.

Why: Promotes transparency with residents for intrusive maintenance while keeping purely operational internal logs private.

Dwellant links compliance and financial control through a structured relational triad.

┌──────────────┐         ┌──────────────┐         ┌──────────────┐

 Asset Tree         ──────>      PME Trigger         ──────>       Contract   

└──────────────┘         └──────────────┘         └──────────────┘

• Triad Linkage Hierarchy: Always link Assets to PMEs, and PMEs to the Contract. Never attach raw assets directly to contracts.

Why: Preserves relational integrity; a contract pays for an event (the service/check), and the event inspects the asset. Bypassing PMEs breaks automated scheduling and reporting.

• Approved Contractor Verification: Contractors must be marked as Approved with current insurance and RAMS; suspended or expired contractors cannot be assigned new contracts.

Why: Protects the managing agent from liability by preventing suspended or unaccredited vendors from receiving automated work orders.

• Financial Controls & Tolerances:
  • Enter total contract values, billing schedules, and expected invoice counts.
  • Set a contract tolerance percentage (ensure you type %, e.g., 5% vs £5) to enable Auto-Approval when incoming invoices match the expected schedule.

Why: Enables automated invoice approval within predefined financial thresholds, removing low-value transactional approval bottlenecks from property managers.

• Cost Coding & Service Charges: Map cost assignments directly to single or multiple service charge schedules to eliminate manual invoice routing.

Why: Ensures invoices are automatically coded to the correct service charge schedule on receipt, speeding up year-end accounting reconciliations.

• Contract Renewal Reminders: Configure automated reminder alerts (e.g., 60-day notice) to trigger retendering workflows ahead of expiry.

Why: Prevents lapse in statutory coverage by giving property teams enough lead time to re-tender expiring contracts.

Role-based access determines who receives tasks, reviews documents, and approves invoices.

• User Group Mapping:
  • Health & Safety Management: Accesses estate and portfolio-level compliance overviews.
  • Health & Safety Approval: Specific group tasked with reviewing uploaded certificates and signing off high-risk RAMS.
  • Property Managers: Assigned day-to-day building operations, localised alerts, and site permits.

Why: Maintains strict separation of duties, ensuring technical safety reviews are handled by qualified personnel while property managers focus on site operations

• Task Routing Rules: Assign PME events directly to the contractor and managing agent group simultaneously rather than individual user accounts to prevent task bottlenecks.

Why: Avoids operational single point of failure bottlenecks if an individual team member is absent or leaves the organisation.

Estate & Portfolio Compliance Dashboards: Track compliance status across buildings and the wider portfolio using clear traffic‑light indicators.

• Compliance Status Key:
  • 🟢 Green: Completed and fully compliant within date range.
  • 🟠 Amber / Orange: Open request scheduled and within valid operational window (not late).
  • 🔴 Red: Overdue event or missing statutory inspection.
  • ❓ Question Mark: Asset exists in the register but lacks an active PME trigger.

Why: Provides an instant, traffic-light visual indicator across individual blocks or entire portfolios, highlighting compliance gaps (like untriggered assets) before audits occur.

• Planned Maintenance Calendar: Use the Portfolio View to track scheduled, open, and completed events across annual cycles. Clicking the paperclip icon opens all associated completion certificates in context.

Why: Gives managers a comprehensive schedule view to balance contractor visits across the year and quickly access completed certificates in context.

• Document Library & Legal Packs: Uploaded certificates are automatically indexed with block tags, asset IDs, and date ranges. This automated metadata feeds directly into pre-formatted legal packs (such as LPE1/LP1 forms) without manual intervention.

Why: Supports the Building Safety Act Golden Thread by ensuring all evidence is pre-indexed, enabling instant generation of legal packs (e.g., LPE1/LP1 forms) without manual administrative searching.