Legionella testing and water hygiene software

Last updated: August 2026

It is the last Thursday of the month. Nine sites on the round were done and two were not, because a plant room key was with someone on annual leave and a classroom was in use at half ten. The monthly fee invoices tomorrow either way. Somewhere in a spreadsheet sit fourteen remedial actions raised this year, and nobody can say, without opening four files, which were completed and on what date.

That last question is the one an HSE inspector, an LCA auditor and a care home’s new registered manager all ask. Most firms answer it slowly, because the compliance record and the commercial record sit in different places and the join between them is a person.

A compliance business, not an installation trade

Water hygiene firms sell five things in some mixture: a legionella risk assessment per site, usually with a schematic and an asset register; a routine monitoring and inspection contract; sampling and laboratory analysis; cleaning, disinfection and chlorination; and remedial works, meaning dead legs removed, tanks replaced, TMV work, insulation and valves.

The commercial shape follows from that list. The assessment is priced close to cost, because the remedial actions it identifies are where the margin sits. That creates an integrity tension the trade discusses openly: an assessor who also sells the remedials has an incentive to find work, which is why independent consultancy is a separate Legionella Control Association registration category, and why some duty holders buy assessment and remedials from different firms.

Three shapes are recognisable: the one or two person risk assessor, selling assessments, audits and training; the regional contractor of five to forty engineers running rounds across a few hundred sites, which is the firm this guide is written for; and the national or facilities management owned group that wins the frameworks.

Commercial and public sector duty holder work is the trade: care homes, hospitals and dental practices, schools, hotels, leisure centres, social landlords and managing agents. Domestic rented housing is a lighter duty and a smaller, price shopped business that shares a name. Where remedial pipework is the main event rather than a consequence, that is a different trade, covered in job management software for plumbers.

The schedule lives in a document you did not write

Where a risk assessment finds a risk that cannot reasonably be avoided, the duty holder must have a written scheme of control. Among the things it must contain are the checks that prove the scheme is effective, and the frequency of those checks. The monitoring round is not a service convention you designed. It is part of a document the customer is required to have and follow, and it usually reaches you as a PDF.

Two things follow. First, no two contracts have the same schedule. HSG274 Part 2 is explicit that the risk assessment defines the frequency of inspection and monitoring, and several rows are ranges rather than fixed intervals. A contractor with two hundred sites maintains two hundred individually shaped schedules.

Second, check which edition you are quoting. All three parts of HSG274 were republished in 2024, and much of the content still circulating reproduces the 2014 tables. The current HSG274 Part 2 puts sentinel hot and cold temperatures at monthly, hot reaching at least 50 °C within one minute (55 °C in healthcare premises) and cold below 20 °C within two minutes. Calorifier flow and return are quarterly, ideally on a rolling monthly rota, with other outlets covered rotationally to profile the whole system. Shower heads are cleaned and descaled quarterly, tanks inspected annually, and the tank water temperature check is listed as annually in summer, which puts a spike of work into July to September.

Outlets unused for seven days or more are flushed weekly, though the guidance prefers removal, with redundant pipework cut back as far as possible. A flushing regime that never ends is evidence that a remedial job was never done.

What you test, and what you keep

Sampling is the most misunderstood part of this trade, and most published answers give half of it. For enclosed mains fed hot and cold water systems, routine microbiological monitoring is not usually required unless the risk assessment or the monitoring indicates a problem. For open systems, meaning cooling towers, evaporative condensers and spa pools, HSE guidance on testing and monitoring is that routine testing should be at least quarterly. Both are true, and stating only one is how a landlord buys a test nobody needed.

Hot and cold systems do get sampled where water is treated with biocides or held at reduced temperatures, where control levels are not consistently achieved, where the population is high risk such as healthcare premises and care homes, and where a system is suspected in an outbreak. Sampling follows BS 7592, from separate hot and cold outlets rather than through mixer taps or anything downstream of a TMV, labelled pre or post flush, analysed by a UKAS accredited laboratory. Culture takes around ten days, so the visit is invoiced before the result completing it exists.

ACOP L8, free to download, lists what should normally be recorded, and carries two retention periods commonly collapsed into one: records are kept while current and for at least two years afterwards, while records of any monitoring inspection, test or check, and their dates, are kept for at least five years. The list also asks for schematic diagrams, a log of contractor visits, and remedial work carried out with its date of completion.

If you are registered, your own duty is longer than your customer’s. The LCA Code of Conduct requires members to keep their own copy of everything in site records for five years after delivering the service. The logbook being on site does not discharge that.

The finding that never closes out

This is the failure the trade’s own commentary cites most, and the one that turns into enforcement. A recommendation in a risk assessment is handed to a repairs team or another contractor, and loses its connection to the assessment it came from.

The mechanics are worth naming, because they are why a spreadsheet cannot hold this. An appointment booked, the inspection completed, the report received, the defect assessed, the remedial done, the evidence checked and the action formally closed are seven distinct states, and most systems collapse them into one column. L8 asks for remedial work required and carried out, and the date of completion. The gap between identified and completed is where duty holders get prosecuted and contractors lose contracts.

Two things widen that gap and neither sits inside your business. The responsible person at the customer often holds the title without the authority to approve expenditure or the time to oversee the programme, so quotes sit unapproved while the risk stays open. And staff turnover means you are often the only party with any memory of the site, which is awkward, because a change of key personnel is itself a reason a risk assessment may no longer be valid.

Access is the third. A plant room locked, a flat occupied, a roof tank hatch padlocked: a missed outlet is not just a lost visit, it is a hole in a compliance schedule, a query on the monthly invoice, and something an LCA member must communicate and escalate. The failure is rarely the first missed appointment. It is the absence of a defined rebooking window and an escalation threshold, a pattern shared with fire risk assessment and extinguisher servicing.

Three billing rhythms on one customer account

Pricing runs on five units at once, which is why the invoicing is hard: a fixed price per site for an assessment, a recurring monthly or quarterly monitoring fee, a per sample charge, a schedule of rates on framework work, and day rate or quoted remedials. Published rates are indicative and swing on outlet count, tanks and buildings: a few hundred pounds for a small commercial building, roughly £800 to £3,000 a year to monitor a medium sized one.

The rhythms do not line up. A monthly fee bills on a calendar, the visits it pays for slip by days, the sample results completing a visit arrive ten days later, and the remedial quote arising from it is a separate document with its own approval chain. Framework work adds a consortium levy off the rate and a valuation cycle that is not your invoice date. Public sector and facilities management clients will not pay without a purchase order raised before the work. And where a site was missed because access was refused, proof of attendance is proof of entitlement to bill.

Tax splits across the same customer. Work covered by CIS includes installing systems for water and heating, so remedial pipework, dead leg removal, tank replacement and TMV installation are construction operations when paid to a subcontractor, while testing and inspection sit outside the scheme. A monitoring visit is outside CIS; the remedial that follows is usually inside it. The VAT domestic reverse charge then applies only to supplies reported within CIS, and not where the customer is an end user who has confirmed that in writing. Most duty holders are end users. Check your own position with your accountant.

Two systems for one visit

Two product categories serve this trade, and almost nothing does both halves well.

Electronic logbook platforms such as ZetaSafe, aquaAdept, C365Cloud, LegionellaSafe and Legionella Dossier are built around assets, schedules, temperature capture and an audit trail. They are strong on evidence, and they do not quote, invoice, or decide a CIS and reverse charge treatment. They are also sold to the estate rather than the contractor: a per unit price suits a duty holder with twenty buildings, not a firm serving two hundred it does not own. Pricing opacity is itself a finding, since of those only C365Cloud publishes a figure, £30 per unit per month, and only because it sits on the government’s Digital Marketplace.

General field service products do jobs, quotes and invoices, then have to be bent into a shape that produces a record an auditor recognises. Published prices include Joblogic from £45 per user per month billed annually, BigChange from £79.95 per licence per month, and Commusoft at around £97 per user per month. Per user pricing fits a rounds business badly: ten engineers is roughly £5,400 to £11,640 a year before any compliance product on top. Planned maintenance trades face the same arithmetic, as HVAC, refrigeration and lift servicing shows.

Three questions worth asking of either kind:

• Can it express a frequency that is a range? A hard coded monthly cannot hold monthly to six monthly as indicated by the risk assessment, and free text loses the schedule.
• Does a finding travel from assessment to quote to works to a dated closure? Nothing here does it convincingly, so ask to be shown rather than told.
• Where is the reading captured? At the outlet, or transcribed that evening from a damp notebook.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch runs the visits, the customers and the money around your compliance record, so the monitoring software you already trust keeps doing the part it is good at.

Repeats, switched on in Settings, creates recurring visits and can pause, skip a date or stop after a set number, so a monitoring round books itself. Monitoring records, chlorination certificates, RAMS and method statements attach to the job as PDFs, images or Word files up to 25 MB and are kept for the life of the job, which is what a duty holder asking for two years of evidence actually needs. A completion report with a write up and up to twelve photographs is required before a job is marked Completed, so a remedial is evidenced on the day rather than described from memory.

Book onto a week calendar, tell the site contact automatically when you are coming, and keep access and remedial conversations on a two way thread with photographs attached.

Then quote the remedial work, 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, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan to try on one site’s monthly round.