Fire risk assessment and extinguisher servicing software

Last updated: August 2026

A site was serviced on 14 March last year. It falls due on 14 March this year. Nobody rings to complain when it is not done, because the customer does not know it was due. The date slips, twelve months pass, and the first person to notice is a fire officer on an audit or an insurer asking for the certificate.

That is the shape of an inspection-led fire safety business, and it is why the admin here does not look like other trades. The work does not arrive. It recurs, on several separate clocks inside the same building, and the thing most likely to cost you money is losing track of a date.

Two trades that sit inside one company

Ask what a fire company does and you get one of three answers. Confusing them is the fastest way to buy the wrong system.

The first is the fire risk assessor: often a one-person consultancy, frequently an ex-fire-service officer, selling a written assessment to a responsible person. The government’s 2023 survey of assessors in England found 18% were sole traders and a further 13% worked in micro-businesses of two to four people, while 38% were the only assessor in their organisation.

The second is the extinguisher and equipment servicing round: one to fifteen engineers working an anniversary list, usually carrying emergency lighting and alarm servicing as well, because one visit covers all three and the customer wants one invoice.

The third is the combined compliance firm, five to fifty staff, selling an annual contract that covers a building’s whole statutory calendar. That is the shape that grows, and the shape with the worst scheduling problem, because it runs four or five recurrence cycles across one list of buildings.

The commercial difference: the first sells a document, the other two sell a recurring visit. Their admin problems are close to opposite, and a product built for one will be wrong about the other. Worth saying plainly, because much published content does not: there is no official count of UK fire risk assessors or servicing firms, and any article quoting a sector size is quoting a guess.

The asset is the unit of scheduling, not the job

Almost every field service product schedules jobs against customers. This trade schedules obligations against assets, then groups them into a visit. That mismatch causes most of the rest of the trouble.

An extinguisher carries its own commissioning date and its own history. BS 5306-3:2017 names the levels the round works to: commissioning, visual inspection, basic service, extended service and overhaul. Different media sit on different cycles, so one site can have several units due a basic service and one due an extended service on the same morning. The per medium intervals live inside the standard, which sits behind BSI’s paywall, so much of what circulates online is second hand summary. Read it, or take it from your certification body.

Emergency lighting adds a layer: a monthly function test of every luminaire and exit sign, and an annual full duration discharge test. BS 5266-1:2025 took effect on 31 October 2025, widened the scope to local area and standby lighting, and introduced photometric verification under BS EN 50172:2024, recommended initially and every five years after. That is a new recurring line most testing guides, still citing the 2016 edition, do not mention. Fire alarm servicing runs to BS 5839-1:2025, effective 30 April 2025, with the customer doing a weekly call point test in the log book and your engineer doing the periodic service. Design and installation belong to software for fire and security installers rather than here.

Layer the residential duties on top and one building carries monthly, quarterly, annual and five yearly obligations with different scopes and different evidence. A missed anniversary is worse than it looks: it is revenue that silently did not happen, and it shows in no report, because the job was never raised.

What the law requires, and where the four nations part company

The commonest outsider error is saying the law requires annual servicing. It does not. In England and Wales the Fire Safety Order’s Article 17 requires facilities and equipment to be subject to a suitable system of maintenance and kept in efficient working order. The British Standard says how. Get that the wrong way round in a tender document and it shows.

Article 9 is the other half: a suitable and sufficient assessment, and a record of it. In England, what section 156 changed on 1 October 2023 is that the assessment must be recorded in full, with the arrangements and the name of whoever carried it out, whatever the size of the business. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023, added the fixed frequency work: quarterly checks of common part fire doors and annual checks of flat entrance doors above 11 metres, and monthly checks of firefighting lifts in high rise blocks.

Then the divergence, which almost nothing on the web gets right in both halves. Regulation 8 in Scotland still requires recording only where five or more people are employed, a licence is required, or an alterations notice says so, and the person with duties is the duty holder, never the responsible person. Northern Ireland keeps the same threshold, calling that person the appropriate person. Wales shares the Order but not the 2022 Regulations, and the Building Safety (Wales) Act 2026 is now on the statute book, making that divergence structural.

Enforcement is measurable. In the year ending March 2025 English services completed 51,020 audits, only 58% with a satisfactory outcome, producing 2,972 formal notifications. Those fire safety audit statistics sit alongside the NFCC’s free public Enforcement Register, which very little competitor content mentions.

Competence, certification and the next three years

A great deal of content asserts that competence became a legal requirement in October 2023. It did not. Section 156 inserted a competence article into the Order, but that subsection was never commenced, and the government’s own guidance says it will be brought into force later. There is no commenced statutory gate and no statutory register.

That is changing. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 report recommended mandatory accreditation of assessor competence, and the government accepted it, committing to independent verification by a UKAS accredited certification body. In March 2026 the department consulted on regulating the profession, England only, closing 18 June 2026: mandatory accreditation, a single competency framework, tiered levels matched to building complexity, a central register, conflict of interest declarations, and possible restriction of higher risk premises to regulated professionals. Only two UKAS accredited bodies certify assessors today.

Alongside it, BS 8674 sets a three level competence framework for individual assessors: Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. BAFE SP205 Version 6 is mapped against it, all SP205 audits from 1 April 2026 run against Version 6, and regulated qualifications become mandatory under that scheme on 31 March 2028.

Set that against the survey: 46% of assessors were certificated or registered, 11% had never been certified and held no professional body membership, 47% named cost as a barrier, and 19% undertook formal annual refresher training. For a sole trader, the next three years hold a five figure question about qualification and about which buildings they may still assess.

Pricing, the variable tail, and the remedials nobody quotes

Assessments are priced per premises by type and complexity. Published guidance for 2025 and 2026 clusters at roughly £200 to £400 for a small office or shop, £300 to £450 for an HMO with three to six occupants and £500 to £1,000 for care premises, with a spread from about £150 to £1,500 and more. Those are indications from assessors’ own guidance, not data. Portfolio buyers negotiate a per property rate, and that is where the BAFE scheme list matters, because certification is close to a condition of entry there.

Servicing is priced per extinguisher plus a site visit or minimum charge, with published examples running from single figures to the mid thirties a unit, and one price list quoting £11.95 per extinguisher plus a £37.97 site visit before VAT. What is included, and whether refills and replacement units are extra, is the commonest source of invoice disputes here. The characteristic invoice is a small recurring core charge with a variable and occasionally alarming tail of condemned units and remedials, so a customer expecting £90 and receiving £340 is normal. Managing that at the visit rather than at the invoice is worth building into how the engineer records the job. Managing agents add a wrinkle: they pay against purchase orders per property and reject invoices without the right reference.

Then the money left on the table. Findings have to travel from a phone or a paper sheet, through an office, into a priced quotation and eventually a return visit, so every firm carries a pile of identified but unquoted defects.

On tax, most of this work sits outside the Construction Industry Scheme, but not all. HMRC’s CISR14160 treats structural fire protection, and detection interacting with it, as inside CIS, while alarm and detection limited to warning is outside. The manual does not address servicing or consultancy directly, so check with your accountant.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch carries the visit, the evidence and the invoice, so the assessment you write stays in your report tool and everything around it stops living in three places.

Completion reports ask for a written write up and up to twelve photographs before a job can be marked Completed, the default for every business. The evidence exists before anyone chases it, which is the difference between a customer’s fire file being complete and being complete-ish. Compliance documents attach PDFs, images and Word files up to 25 MB and are kept for the life of the job, so the assessment, the servicing record and the photographs sit on one trail per site.

Recurring visits, switched on in Settings, put a site back on the calendar automatically. Book onto a week calendar, tell the customer when you are coming, and keep the access conversation on a two way thread with photographs.

Then quote the remedials, invoice from the phone and take card payment into your own Stripe account, with overdue invoices chasing themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days.

Every feature is on every plan, the caps are on seats and templates only, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan. If your compliance round is electrical rather than fire, EICR and PAT testing software covers that shape.