Before the Permit Gets Signed Off
An auditor arriving at a PMP or Optants excavation in progress has about five minutes to assess whether the operative is compliant before traffic builds and the site set-up question becomes moot. The barrier line is either set up correctly with all materials and tools inside, or it is not. The Cat and Genny were used for location before the dig broke ground, or they were not and you are finding out now. The 1.2-metre footway clearance is there or pedestrians are already stepping into the road.
The audit that gets captured on a voice note or mentally noted "to log later" has three problems: detail degrades within 30 minutes, the non-compliant finding becomes hard to evidence without a timestamp and the operative's name on record, and any follow-up remediation cannot be tracked without a written reference. A structured audit record, filled in at the kerb while you are still looking at the site, is the difference between an audit trail and an anecdote.
What the Record Captures at Each Stage of the Dig
The Stage of Work at Audit field locks in the work state at the time of inspection: Site set-up, Dig, Fit, Backfill, or Reinstatement. This is not administrative tidiness — it determines which compliance checks are relevant. A Cat & Genny finding is load-bearing at Site Set-up and Dig. Surface protection matters from the moment the footway is broken and through Reinstatement. Barrier compliance is relevant across all five stages. An audit that does not capture the work stage cannot be mapped to the correct inspection criteria.
The Cat & Genny field has five states: Cat & Genny both present and in use, Cat only, Genny only, Not in dig area (a specific failure state where they are on the vehicle but not deployed), and N/A. The N/A designation matters: it acknowledges that some work types genuinely do not require cable avoidance. An auditor who logs N/A without the corresponding justification in comments is creating a gap that the next QA reviewer will flag. The Comments field paired with Cat & Genny is where "trench in private land, No PIA assets registered, diversion confirmed" goes.
The Barrier Use module captures five simultaneous compliance states: materials within barriers, tools within barriers, permit board displayed, barriers fully closed, and clean and presentable. These are checked independently because they fail independently. An operative might have the permit board up and the barriers fully closed but the spoil heap sitting two metres outside the barrier line where a pedestrian tripped on it an hour ago. The multi-select structure means the audit record is granular enough to distinguish between a site that is broadly compliant with one specific deficiency and one that is non-compliant across multiple elements.
PPE and the Photo That Carries the Audit
Hard hat, high-viz, and boots are the three PPE checkpoints. Simple, but the boolean state per item matters for enforcement. An operative in high-viz and boots but no hard hat in an active excavation is a non-compliant finding, not a partial pass.
The two Photo fields — labelled Picture and pic — are where the audit becomes defensible. An audit record with a before-dig photo timestamped against the WR reference, the operative's name, and a Stage: Dig annotation is evidence. An audit record without a photo is testimony. The difference matters when a complaint about pavement damage comes in three weeks after the job is closed, and you are pulling the record to establish the surface protection state at the time of Reinstatement.
The WR Reference ties the entire record back to the works management system. Every finding — the barrier spacing violation on Lot 4 of a bulk metering installation on a residential street where the footway was technically 1.1 metres at the narrowest point — is linked to a work reference that can be pulled across the contract. When the operations manager wants to know which operative has the highest rate of PPE non-compliance across the past 90 days, the WR Reference is the join key.
The Registered on Site boolean is the first field you fill in. If the operative is not registered on the permit for that location, everything else is irrelevant.