PDF or CSV, and when each one is right.

Section 01How to do it

1. 01

   Send a PDF when somebody will read it

   Inspection reports, survey reports, evidence packs, quotes and invoices. Laid out, paginated, carrying your terms — a document, not data.

2. 02

   Send a CSV when somebody will analyse it

   Analytics, Financials, Activity, inspection history, clients and team each export from their own page; the full door and penetration registers come out of the workspace archive. If the recipient is going to filter or pivot the numbers, do not make them retype a PDF.

3. 03

   Name things so they sort

   Property, document type, date. A folder of forty reports sorts itself if the names are consistent and becomes a search problem if they are not.

4. 04

   Let the portal do the sending

   Clients self-serve the current version rather than holding a copy that went stale the moment a remedial closed.

5. 05

   Export before any handover

   Contract ending, supplier changing, auditor asking — take the full set as PDF and CSV. There is no request process and no fee.

Section 02What the app actually does here

• Inspection reports, evidence packs, survey reports and Works Completed Reports are free, however many you issue
• On the Usage plan, quotes, invoices and RAMS carry a per-document fee, deduplicated so one document is one fee; on the Seat plan no usage is metered at all
• Per-door reports can be bundled into a single ZIP for a whole inspection
• Analytics, Financials, Activity, inspection history, clients and team each export as CSV from their own page; the full registers come out in the workspace archive
• Pagination is height-aware, so a four-hundred-door report still numbers correctly
• A Works Completed Report can be previewed before issuing, then re-downloaded unchanged
• The full archive bundles the CSV datasets for whichever workspace you are in — around forty in Fire Doors, around twenty in Fire Stopping. It excludes photographs
• A full archive is always free on the Seat plan; on the Usage plan one is free every seven days, and a second in the same week is priced by size

Section 03What goes wrong

Every one of these has cost somebody real time. They are cheap to avoid and expensive to unwind.

Section 04Questions

Section 05Related