Part of the PAT series on the Mobtag platform.
In short: Registers rot when re-keying from test instruments is the plan. A live, per-item record—with retest in view on scan—moves a round from “who has the list this month?” to a route you can name, resource, and defend when a landlord, insurer, or a line of questioning about duty of care lands.
Pass, fail, and the photo of the label are data, not a docket in a tray. At volume, the businesses that keep control are the ones with per-asset history that the next engineer opens before they touch the next socket.
When the “master spreadsheet” becomes folklore
- Estate growth outruns the row you half-agreed was canonical last year.
- Two people maintain two exports because the database is “a bit fiddly”—and neither file matches the certificate the insurance broker last saw.
- A fail lives in a camera roll or a sticker in a tray, not in the same row the compliance lead filters the night before a visit.
That is a grain problem first, not a people problem. You need one identifier per appliance that survives a move, a re-tag, and the “which cable?” question at three a.m.
What the trail should contain (minimum)
| Element | Why it is not optional |
|---|---|
| Stable ID for the item | Room numbers and “the blue one” do not scale. |
| Last test outcome (pass/fail) and date | Re-test surprises happen when the outcome lives only on a sticker. |
| Next due (or the interval you actually run) | Rounds are not “every Q2 when we get to it”. |
| Engineer or company who tested | Traceability is a name, not a generic “PAT done” row. |
| Fail detail and photo of label or damage | Insurers and HSE-style questions are often visual. |
From “list” to route you can plan
Once every item points at a row, a PAT round stops being a hunt and starts being work you can schedule.
- Filter by site, floor, or tenancy the way the key holder thinks.
- Load-balance engineers against a backlog of overdue or due this month, not a PDF sorted only by room.
- Name a round owner: the person signed up for “we are green in that building by date X”, not a folder everyone hopes is current.
Multi-tenant and when the customer asks for proof
In shared sites—retail, managed offices, student halls—the view the end customer sees should match the register the compliance lead exports. If the “customer portal” is a second spreadsheet with a different row count, you lose a Friday to reconciliation before every satisfaction survey or landlord inspection.
| Pain at scale | A digital line helps by… |
|---|---|
| Estate growth without a clean row per appliance | Groups that still filter to one item ID when “which extension lead in room 4B?” is the question. |
| Re-test surprise in a shared tenancy | A customer-facing view tied to the same facts the compliance team owns. |
| Landlord or auditor wants a CSV the night before | Exporting from the same data the test engineer already saved—not a pivot on a static download from last month. |
After a fail or a safety incident involving portable gear
A fail on a lethal path or a near-miss deserves more than a sticker in a tray. The record should state what left service, what replaced it (if anything), and who was told—on a time-stamped line the next engineer can open in a single scan, not a scattered thread per serial.
- If the appliance leaves the estate, the row should close or archive cleanly so no one re-tests a cable in a landfill.
- If it is repaired, the re-test, parts note, and next due should all live together so a year later no one is rebuilding the day from invoices.
Summary: Per-asset history on scan is how you run high-volume PAT without a parallel myth in Excel that only one person dares to sort the week before a visit. One ID, one growing file the engineer touches, and exports the board or landlord can trust are all the same row.