Summary
Accreditation is granted against premises and equipment as much as against curriculum. FacilitiesOS records what a provider actually has — the properties, the workshops, the machines, the vehicles, the safety equipment — and turns it into the readiness statement a site visit asks for.
The module exists because that statement is otherwise assembled from memory the week before the visit, and memory does not have serial numbers.
Who This Guide Is For
- Operations and campus managers responsible for premises
- Quality officers preparing for an accreditation or verification visit
- Anyone who owns equipment a qualification depends on
Prerequisites
- Your campuses captured under provider settings
- A list of the equipment each programme requires
- Access to lease documents, compliance certificates and equipment records
Step 1: Record the Estate
Navigate to Facilities → Estate.
Capture each property and the locations within it — workshops, classrooms, stores, residences. A location is what an asset gets assigned to and what an inspection is carried out against.
Step 2: Build the Asset Register
Navigate to Facilities → Assets.
Capture the equipment: what it is, where it is, what condition it is in, what it cost and when it was acquired. Serial numbers matter here more than anywhere else in the platform — an asset register without them cannot survive a verification.
Assets can be verified in a physical count run: the verification run produces a list, somebody walks the site and scans or confirms each item, and the run reports what was not found. Do one before your first audit rather than during it.
Step 3: Plan Maintenance and Raise Work Orders
Navigate to Facilities → Work Orders.
A work order is a job on an asset or a location. Raise them for breakdowns, and let maintenance plans raise them for scheduled servicing. The value is the history: an asset with three work orders in six months is telling you something a condition rating will not.
Step 4: Inspect
Navigate to Facilities → Inspections.
Inspections run from templates so that the same things get checked the same way each time. Safety equipment, fire compliance, workshop condition, residence standards. A completed inspection with a failed item should produce a work order — link them, so the finding and the fix live together.
Step 5: Track Renewals Before They Lapse
Navigate to Facilities → Renewals.
Leases, certificates of occupancy, fire compliance certificates, machine certifications, vehicle licences. Everything with an expiry date goes here, because an expired certificate discovered by an auditor costs considerably more than the same certificate renewed a month early.
Step 6: Produce the Readiness Snapshot
Navigate to Facilities → Readiness.
The readiness view compares what your programmes require against what the estate actually holds, and produces a snapshot with a percentage and a list of gaps. Take the snapshot before a visit and keep it — it is dated evidence of what you knew and when.
Read the gaps as work, not as a score. A conditional readiness result with four named gaps and dates against them is a stronger position in a visit than an unexplained higher percentage.
Step 7: Assemble the Evidence Pack
Navigate to Facilities → Evidence.
An evidence pack collects the documents a visit will ask for — leases, certificates, photographs, the asset register, the last inspections. Build it from the register rather than from a folder on somebody’s laptop.
What Good Looks Like
- Every asset that a qualification depends on is on the register, with a serial number and a location
- Renewals are tracked and none are inside 30 days of expiry unnoticed
- Failed inspection items have work orders against them
- A dated readiness snapshot exists from before the last visit
Common Mistakes
- Capturing assets without locations. A register that cannot say where something is cannot be verified.
- Treating readiness as a score to raise. It is a gap list to close.
- Keeping certificates in a shared drive. Expiry dates that nothing watches are expiry dates that pass.