A passive fire audit report should let someone who was not on the walk find each defect, understand the risk, price the fix and prove it was closed. That means a location that matches your drawings, photographs of both the area and the close-up, the barrier and service type, the recommended action, a severity rating, and space for a closure photograph.
The test of a good report
Here is the only test that matters. Hand the report to someone who was not on the site walk and ask them to find finding number 47. If they can walk to it without calling you, the report works. If they cannot, you have paid for a document that will need the auditor back on site before anything gets fixed.
That sounds obvious. It is also the single most common failure, because a photograph of a hole with a caption reading “unsealed penetration, 4th floor” is useless in a building with two hundred of them.
Eight things every finding needs
- Location — building, floor, room or grid reference, and the shaft or riser identifier. It must match the naming your drawings already use.
- Two photographs — one wide enough to show where you are standing, one close enough to show the defect.
- Barrier type — what the wall or floor is, and its intended rating.
- Service passing through — cable bundle, plastic pipe, duct, tray. This decides the fix.
- The observation — what is actually wrong, in a sentence anyone can read.
- Recommended action — what should be installed, not just that something should be.
- Severity — so the list can be spent against in the right order.
- A closure field — space for the after photograph and a sign-off date.
Eight fields. None of them are difficult. Together they turn a list of problems into a work package.
Severity, so you can spend in the right order
Not every finding is equal, and a flat list forces you to either do all of it or guess. A simple three-level rating removes the guesswork.
| Level | What it means | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| High | An open route between compartments on an escape route, a stairwell, or between wards. Smoke can travel now. | Immediately |
| Medium | A defective or unrated seal in a compartment wall away from escape routes, or a coating breach on protected steel. | Next planned window |
| Low | Missing labels, missing records, minor damage that does not currently breach the barrier. | Bundle with other works |
Scroll sideways on a phone.
In practice, the high-severity list is usually short. That is the useful discovery: most buildings do not need everything redone, they need a specific set of openings fixed and everything else recorded.
Location codes are the boring part that matters
A building has hundreds of near-identical penetrations. Without a naming system that matches your drawings, the report and the building never line up.
The rule is simple: use the codes that already exist. If your drawings call it Block B, Level 4, Riser R3, the report calls it that too. Inventing a new numbering scheme for the audit means someone has to translate twice — once to price the work, once to check it was done.
Every finding gets a unique reference that carries the location inside it — for example B-L4-R3-012. That single string survives being copied into a snag register, a purchase order and a handover file without anyone losing track of where it is.
Closing the loop
An audit report is only half of the job. The other half is the closure record: the after photograph, the system used to fix it, and a date. Without that, in twelve months you have a report saying the building had forty defects and nothing saying they were fixed.
A workable close-out cycle is five steps: identify, assign, rectify, re-inspect, document. Each finding moves through all five and ends with a photograph in the same file as the one that started it.
This is also the honest test of an auditor. A firm that hands you a defect list and disappears has done the easy half. Our audit page sets out how we run the close-out, including the fact that the audit fee is adjusted if you appoint us for the remedial work — so the list is not a sales document.
Questions to ask before you appoint anyone
- Can I see a sample report with the location fields filled in?
- Does every finding carry two photographs and a unique reference?
- How is severity decided, and by whom?
- Will the report tell me what to install, or only what is wrong?
- Is there a closure field, and will you re-inspect?
- Will the summary reference NBC Part-IV in a form I can hand to an authority?
Six questions. A firm that answers all six easily will produce something your team can use. One that hedges on the sample report is worth walking away from.
