It’s Friday night and there are six landlord records still to write up from the week. The readings are on the back of a job sheet, in your phone’s notes and, for one flat in particular, mostly in your head. It would be lovely if software just did the lot. We built Datify so that it can’t, on purpose. This is why, and where exactly the line sits.
What the regulations put on you
You know this better than we do, so here’s only the part that shaped the product. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 say, in regulation 3(3), that a self-employed person can’t do gas work, and an employer can’t let an employee do it, unless they belong to a class of persons approved by the Health and Safety Executive. That’s the Gas Safe Register. The HSE’s guidance for landlords is blunt about it: all checks must be done by a Gas Safe registered engineer.
Regulation 36 is the landlord one. The landlord has the duty to get each appliance and flue checked at least every 12 months and to keep the record. But regulation 36(3)(c) spells out what that record must contain, and two of those items are you: “the name and signature of the individual carrying out the check” and the registration number that individual, or their employer, is registered under. The record also has to confirm that the check covered the matters in regulation 26(9): the flue, the combustion air supply, the operating pressure or heat input, and safe functioning.
Electronic records are fine. The HSE’s page on the record accepts an electronic or scanned signature, as long as the record uniquely identifies the registered engineer who did the check and can be printed when needed. It also says the record should only be issued once all the required checks have been completed. So the law doesn’t care about paper. It cares about who.
The law doesn’t care whether the record is on paper. It cares whose name is on it, and whether they did the check.
What Datify fills in
Once you take the readings and the judgement out, a lot of a gas safety record is admin. It’s the same admin you’ve typed a hundred times, and that’s the bit Datify does. Here’s how the items from regulation 36(3)(c) split.
The admin details come from what Datify already knows: the landlord or managing company, the property, the tenant, the date, your business. The middle rows come from you. Send a voice note from the van, or a message with the readings, and Datify writes them into the right boxes so you’re not typing on a doorstep. The last three rows are yours and nobody else’s.
When you’re done, the draft comes back to you to check. Where a form is required, Datify uses one from the proper source and shows which version it is. The same approach covers job sheets, service records, completion reports and remedial work proposals. The details are in the gas safety records guide.
What it never does
This is the list we built around. None of it can be switched on by a setting.
If a technical field is blank, it stays blank and Datify asks you. It doesn’t fill the gap with something that looks about right. The record stays a draft until you’ve checked every technical field and signed it, and that holds whatever other rules you’ve set. You might let Datify confirm routine bookings on its own. You can’t let it sign. (More on where those lines sit in trust is a dial.)
Why we built it this way
Partly it’s the law, as above. But even if the regulations were silent, we’d have built it the same way, for three reasons.
It’s your registration on the line. If a record is wrong, it’s your name on it, not ours. Software that signs for you doesn’t take any of that responsibility off you. It just hides the moment where you’d have caught the mistake.
“Nearly always right” is the dangerous bit. A tool that filled in readings and was right ninety-nine times out of a hundred would train you to stop checking. Then the hundredth one goes out. For a quote, that costs you an awkward phone call. On a gas safety record, nobody should be taking that bet. So Datify fills in the admin and stops there.
It’s the same line everywhere else. Datify drafts quotes and invoices, and by default you approve those too. It answers the phone, but it doesn’t diagnose a fault or give safety advice. The rule underneath is simple. Datify does the typing, and whoever’s name goes on the result makes the decision. On a gas safety record, that’s always the engineer.
To be straight about where it’s at: paperwork forms are being set up with each pilot business, so ask us during setup which records are ready for the work you do. If you write a lot of landlord records, our piece on landlord gas safety records goes through the admin around them.
Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, gas work and landlord safety checks are done by Gas Safe registered engineers, and the record carries the name, registration number and signature of the engineer who did the check. So Datify drafts the admin and writes up the readings you give it. It never guesses a result, ticks the checks, signs or issues the record. You check every technical field, sign it and send it.
Writes about what actually happens when you put an AI in charge of real business operations — including the parts that go wrong.