How it works
Twelve stages, one record. Each stage stamps a date and a name onto the case, so the story of what happened is written as it happens rather than reconstructed later.
1. The tenant reports the problem
The tenant opens a link or scans a QR code carrying your organisation's name and branding. There is no app to install and no account to create.
- One question on each screen
- Plain English, short sentences
- Pictures of mould, damp, condensation and leaks to help them choose
- Photographs optional — a report is never blocked for want of one
- Save and come back later with a short code
- "I am not sure" is a valid answer to every question
Or a person takes it for them
A contact centre, housing officer, support worker or family member can log the report instead. The staff form records the true time the report arrived, not the time it was typed in, so a call taken on Monday and logged on Wednesday still has its clock running from Monday.
Backdating must be explained in writing, and the explanation is kept permanently. Forward-dating is refused outright.
A telephone report produces exactly the same duties, the same deadlines and the same evidence trail as an online one. Nothing about it is second class.
2. The statutory clocks start
The tenant is given a case reference and a private link to follow progress. Your team sees a new case with its deadlines already calculated.
To complete an investigation, from the moment you became aware.
To give the tenant a written summary of what the investigation found.
To begin any work the investigation says is needed.
How a working day is calculated
A working day excludes Saturdays, Sundays and Scottish bank holidays. The Scottish calendar is not the English one: Scotland observes 2 January and St Andrew's Day, and takes the summer bank holiday on the first Monday in August rather than the last. Local trades holidays, which appear on no national list, are registered per organisation.
Periods are stored in UTC and counted against Europe/London calendar dates, so a deadline does not shift by an hour across the March and October clock changes. The definition itself is held as versioned configuration rather than written into the software, and every case records which version it was judged under — so the rules can be corrected without altering the basis on which an earlier case was assessed.
Where you genuinely cannot comply for reasons outwith your control, the system records the reason, the revised timescale and the fact that the tenant was told in writing — because that is what the regulations require you to do.
3. Triage, by a person
Each new case arrives with a suggested priority and any risk flags: an active leak, water near electrical fittings, a baby under two, a resident over 65, a pregnancy, a disability or long-term illness, a repeat report, or a problem present for over a year.
The suggestion is decision support and is labelled as such in the record. A named member of your staff confirms or changes it, and that decision is recorded.
Why a reported health concern does not auto-escalate
It is always recorded, always shown, and always reviewed by a person. But it is expected on most reports, and if a single tick set every case to high priority, the queue would carry no information — making genuinely urgent cases harder to find.
Nothing is lost by this: the statutory deadlines are identical for every case regardless of priority.
4. The inspection
The part most systems treat as a tick box, and the part that actually decides whether the problem gets solved.
Recorded room by room
- What was seen, in plain description
- Moisture readings with the location and instrument noted
- Air temperature, surface temperature and relative humidity
- Visible defects
- Original photographs, stored encrypted
- Whether access was achieved, and if not, why
Observations kept apart from conclusions
The form separates what was seen from what it probably means, and asks for a confidence level on the latter. A damp patch is a fact. "Penetrating damp through defective pointing" is a judgement.
Where a single visit cannot settle the cause, the technician records that further investigation is needed rather than guessing. That recommendation is part of the record.
5. Findings, repair and evidence
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Written findings to the tenant
What was observed, the likely causes, an honest note about the limits of a single visit, the works recommended, and practical advice — which never doubles as blame.
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Repair instructed
Contractor, works order reference and instruction, with the date recorded.
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Work started and completed
The start date satisfies the five-working-day duty. Completion evidence and photographs are attached to the same case.
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Tenant confirmation
The tenant confirms the work was done, and that confirmation is part of the record.
6. The bit almost everyone skips
Checks at 7, 30 and 90 days
Completing a repair does not close a DampFix case. The system schedules three follow-up checks automatically and keeps them on the dashboard until someone has done them.
If the tenant reports the problem is unchanged or worse, the case reopens against its own history — it does not begin again as a fresh report with the past erased.
Recurrence you can see
Because repeat problems stay attached to the same property and the same history, patterns become visible: the block where mould keeps returning, the elevation that has been repointed twice, the case that has been "fixed" three times.
That is the difference between a repairs log and asset intelligence.
The record you can hand over
Any case can be exported as a single self-contained document, ready to print or save as a PDF.
- When you became aware, and how
- Every statutory duty, its deadline and whether it was met
- The complete history, in order, with names and times
- An integrity statement confirming the record has not been altered
Tamper-evident by design
Each entry is hashed together with the entry before it. Change one and every hash after it breaks, which the system detects and reports. The case history table is also append-only at database level, so ordinary edits and deletions are refused outright.
See it with real case data
A demonstration runs on entirely fictional cases — including one that has already breached its deadline, so you can see exactly what that looks like on the dashboard.