If you only fix one thing about your electrical compliance, fix this.
A tag on a cord asserts that an item passed a test on a date. Anyone with a printer can produce one. A register is what turns that assertion into evidence, and it is the thing almost nobody has.
Why the register is the actual deliverable
Picture the moment this matters. Someone has been hurt, or an insurer is asking questions, or a prequalification assessor wants proof, or you are selling the business.
The question is always some version of: how do you know this equipment is safe?
With tags alone, the honest answer is "there were stickers on things". You cannot say how many items you own, whether anything was missed, what failed last year, or what happened to it. You cannot prove a system existed — only that some testing occurred.
With a register you can answer in about thirty seconds, with a document. That difference is the entire product.
This is also why we are wary of per-item pricing. It pays a provider for tags, which are the by-product, and pays nothing for the register, which is the thing with the value. See what test and tag should cost.
What a register has to contain
Per item, at minimum:
| Field | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Item ID | Ties the physical tag to the record. Without it the tag floats free. |
| Description | "Dell monitor" is enough. Make it findable by a human. |
| Category | Hand tool, lead, IT, appliance, portable RCD. Drives the interval. |
| Location / zone | Building, floor, room. The zone drives the interval too. |
| Class | Class I or Class II. Determines which tests apply. |
| Date in service | Starts the clock, especially for new equipment. |
| Last test date | |
| Result | Pass, fail, or removed from service. |
| Tester | Name, not just company. |
| Next due date | The field everything else exists to produce. |
| Interval and reasoning | The risk-assessment justification. This is what makes the number defensible. |
| Notes | Failure reasons, repairs, battery replacements, anything unusual. |
Two fields do most of the heavy lifting and are the two most often absent.
Interval and reasoning. A date with no justification is a number someone picked. One sentence — "office zone, controlled environment, light handling, 12 months" — converts it into a documented decision. That sentence is what a regulator or an insurer is actually looking for.
Notes on failures. A register showing only passes is not credible. The failures, and what was done about them, are the evidence the system works. See what happens when an appliance fails.
Identifying items so the IDs survive
The commonest reason a register decays is that the identifiers stop matching the items.
Use a scheme that encodes something useful. Something like WKO-B1-WS-0142 — site, building, zone, sequence. It survives being read aloud over the phone, and if a label falls off you can still work out roughly what it was.
Do not encode the interval or the year in the ID. Both change. An ID containing 12M becomes a lie the day the interval moves.
Put the label somewhere that survives. Not on the part that gets handled, not on a surface that gets washed, not on a removable panel. On a lead, near the plug but not on the flex.
Number the zones before you number the items. Zones are the backbone of the whole system, because intervals attach to zones. Get them right first.
Accept some attrition. Labels come off. Build in a reconciliation step at each visit rather than pretending it will not happen.
Walking the site
The first round is a stocktake with testing attached, not the other way round. Work zone by zone and be systematic.
- Draw the zones first. Office, workshop, yard, kitchen, store, plant room. Write one line per zone describing the environment — this becomes your interval justification.
- Work a room completely before moving on. Resist the urge to follow interesting equipment into the next room. You will lose your place and you will miss things.
- Look where equipment hides. Under desks. Behind machinery. In ceiling spaces. In the back of the van. In the container that has been a store for two years. Behind the fridge.
- Open the store room and the cupboard of leads. This is where you will find a decade of accumulated extension leads, most of which should be thrown out rather than entered on a register and tested forever.
- Ask staff what they brought from home. Heaters, kettles, chargers, fans, desk lamps. These never go through purchasing, so they are invisible to any register built from purchase records — and they are usually the oldest items on site.
- Record items you are not testing, and why. Fixed wiring, items out of scope, equipment belonging to a tenant. A gap you have documented is not a gap.
- Photograph anything unusual. Damage, odd installations, things you want a second opinion on later.
Expect the first round to produce a batch of failures that will not recur at that rate. That is accumulated debt being paid off once, not a sign the programme is expensive. Budget for it and tell whoever holds the budget in advance.
Choosing where it lives
The honest answer: a spreadsheet run properly beats expensive software run badly, and we have seen plenty of both.
What actually matters, in order:
You own the data. If your register lives in a provider's proprietary system, ask what happens when you leave. The answer should be an export in a usable format, unconditionally, no argument. Get it in writing before you start.
It is accessible to more than one person. A register on the maintenance manager's laptop is a register you lose when he does.
It survives a provider change. This is the single biggest argument for a plain format. A CSV opens anywhere, in ten years, without a licence.
It can be filtered by due date. This is the one operational thing you will do with it constantly.
Everything else — dashboards, apps, QR codes — is a nice-to-have. Useful, occasionally excellent, never the point.
Keeping it alive
A register decays the day it is built unless someone owns it. Four habits:
- One named person owns it. Not "facilities". A person, with a named backup.
- Purchasing tells them. Anything electrical bought, hired, donated or brought from home gets a line when it arrives, with its in-service date and first-test-due date. Thirty seconds.
- Reconcile at every visit. Not just "test what is on the list" but "what is here that is not on the list, and what is on the list that is not here". This is where the value is.
- Review the zone reasoning annually, or whenever the work changes.
The reconciliation step is the one that separates a real programme from a recurring appointment. A provider who only tests what you gave them is not maintaining your register — they are processing it.
The free template
We have put the structure above into a spreadsheet you can download and use, with the fields, an example row and the zone-reasoning sheet already set up. No email required, and it is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Download the free electrical asset register template →
If you would rather not build it yourself, that is most of what a first visit from us consists of — and the register we hand back is yours to take anywhere.
Related: how often you should test and tag and what the law actually requires of you.