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Documents and certificates

Every document your
business has to produce.

Certificates, permits, orders, applications and site records. Fifty-eight document types, generated from the job data your people already captured, on your letterhead, signed on site, emailed from the system with every send logged, and findable again years later from the same reference.

Show me my documents → See the compliance registers
58 document types 51 generators 1,783 sends logged numbering issued by the system
What it replaces

The document and the record
are usually two different things,
which is the whole problem.

The gas record
A duplicate pad in the van. The carbon copy comes back in three weeks looking like it has been sat on.
Retyped
Certification software
A separate package that knows nothing about the job, so the address and client are typed a second time.
Double entry
Permits
A template on a shared drive. Somebody copies last month's, changes the date, forgets the site.
Wrong on the page
Purchase orders
A spreadsheet with a logo pasted in the header. Two buyers have it open, so the numbers collide.
Duplicate references
Toolbox talks
A printed sheet with signatures on it, scanned if anyone remembers. Last March takes a day to find.
Unfindable
Eighteen months later
A client asks for a certificate. It is in an outbox, on a desktop, or gone.
Cannot produce it
The fix Make the document a rendering of the record Not a re-entry of it
How it works

Six properties that follow
from one design decision.

The document is generated from the record every time it is asked for. Everything below is a consequence of that.

The record and the
document cannot disagree

01

The PDF reads the live row directly. There is no export step, no stored copy that drifts, and no possibility of a certificate saying something the system does not.

  • No transcription step and no transcription error
  • The engineer enters it once, on site
  • Reissued a year later, identical
  • The office is not the bottleneck
Generated, not assembledLive

Numbering issued
by the system

02

A single generator issues each document series, zero padded and sequential, scoped to the document family.

  • Two people cannot raise the same permit number
  • A missing number in a series is visible
  • The number is a real identifier that finds the record
  • Your existing sequence can be continued at go live
References you can trustLive

Signed where
the work was

03

The engineer signs on the phone screen and, where the form requires it, the client signs underneath before he leaves site.

  • The signature image drawn into the PDF
  • With the signatory's printed name and the date
  • More than thirty tables carry a signature column
  • A signed day works sheet is a paid day works sheet
Worth more than one obtained laterLive

Your letterhead,
not ours

04

Each document family carries its own designed A4 artwork, with your logo, colours, accreditation marks and typefaces embedded in the PDF.

  • Full bleed artwork rather than a logo in a corner
  • Your typefaces embedded, not substituted
  • Your accreditation marks where they belong
  • A design step at implementation, done with you
Clients see your documentLive

Photographs in
the document

05

Site photographs are attached to the record and printed in the report, captioned and in order, rather than living in a message thread.

  • Full appendix pages on reports and site records
  • Grouped under the visit they belong to on assets
  • The picture of the defect is in the report of the defect
  • 1,642 photographs on fire door records alone
Evidence, attachedLive

Every send
on record

06

Every outbound message is logged with the recipient, the subject, the attachment, the exact content and the provider's response.

  • 1,783 messages logged, 1,161 carrying an attachment
  • The covering wording is recoverable, not just the fact
  • We never received it becomes a two minute answer
  • Clients pull their own copies from their portal
Proof it was issuedLive
What actually gets produced

Fifty-eight document types,
grouped the way a
contractor thinks about them.

Statutory and certificated

Domestic gas safety recordCommercial gas installation reportF-Gas and REFCOM log bookFire door maintenance recordChlorination certificateEmergency lighting checklistAccident and incident reportNear miss report

Safety control documents

Hot work permitWork at height permitTask specific ladder permitTask specific steps permitLone working permitGeneral permit to workLimitation of accessToolbox talk registerDynamic risk assessment

Site records

Day work sheet, priced and unpricedEngineer's reportSite survey reportSite diaryCall-out sheetMaintained asset reportSite poster with QR codesAsset labels

Commercial

QuotationPurchase orderGoods received noteSubcontract order deedSmall works orderSubcontractor invoicePayment certificateApplication for paymentSales invoicePayment receiptReimbursement claim

Stores and logistics

Delivery noteCollection noteStore collection noteStore return noteDamage report

People

Weekly timesheetPayslip style summaryA3 training matrixA3 e-learning matrix
The one that gets remembered

The training matrix exports as a single A3 landscape page, colour coded green, amber and red, with the expired and expiring counts printed at the top. Thirty staff fit on one sheet. It is the document a main contractor asks for at the pre-start meeting and the one a scheme assessor opens first, and producing it is one button rather than a morning in a spreadsheet.

Printed documents and paperwork on a desk
1,161Logged emails carrying an attachment
1,659QR labels generated for assets and sites
242Fire door records signed on a phone

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026.

What it does not do

Five claims a document
engine is usually oversold on.

Each of these is a sentence you will find on a competitor's page. None of them is true here.

01
Not every document emails itself
Emailing with an attachment is implemented on specific screens rather than being a universal button on every document. Every send that does happen is logged in full. Expanding it to the documents you send most is a normal part of the configuration work, and we would rather tell you now than have you discover it in month two.
02
No delivery or open tracking
The email log records that the mail provider accepted the message, which is not the same as it being delivered, opened or read. We will not describe it as any of those, because to a commercial manager the difference matters and to us the distinction is the point of keeping a log at all.
03
Documents are regenerated, not archived
Because the document is produced from the record on demand, as long as the record exists the document can be produced again, identical, from the same reference. That is what makes an audit answerable. The trade off worth knowing is that where a client needs a byte identical copy of the exact file that was sent, that lives in the email log against the send rather than in a frozen archive.
04
The electrical sign off is not an EIC or an EICR
It is a company handover document carrying your own quality management form reference, and the same applies to the mechanical sign off. The chlorination certificate and the emergency lighting checklist are your own forms supporting a wider regime rather than certification issued under a scheme. We are precise about this because your clients will be.
05
Exports are spreadsheet compatible, not native workbooks
Two reports produce a proper comma separated file built on the server, with the full column set. Several individual tables generate a spreadsheet file in the browser. There is no spreadsheet library in the platform, so we say export to CSV, which is accurate, rather than generates Excel workbooks, which is not.

All fifty-eight document types above are produced by a live business every week. These five are the boundary of the claim.

Questions

Asked before anybody
trusts a document engine.

Can we have our own letterhead and our own layouts?+
Yes, and it is expected. Each document family has its own full page artwork, and your logo, colours, accreditation marks and typefaces are built into it during implementation. It is a design step we do with you rather than a logo upload box, which is why the results look like your documents rather than a template with a logo dropped in the corner. Where your existing form asks questions ours does not, those fields get added.
We already have a certification package. Do we have to replace it?+
No. Plenty of firms run a specialist certification tool alongside Unibuild, and the honest position is that a dedicated certification package will always have more certificate variants than we do. What Unibuild gives you is the other fifty-odd documents that package does not produce, tied to the same job, the same client and the same asset. If your certification package is doing a job you are happy with, keep it and let Unibuild carry everything else.
How long are documents kept and can we get them back?+
Documents are generated from the underlying record on demand, so as long as the record exists the document can be produced again, identical, from the same reference. Records are archived rather than deleted across thirty-seven tables, so a project you closed three years ago is still complete when a defect claim arrives. Retention policy for your business records is your decision and one your data protection adviser should be involved in, because keeping personal data longer than necessary is itself a compliance question.
Will our engineers actually use it?+
They use it because it is less work than the alternative. There is no separate paperwork step: the engineer completes the record on the app because that is how he records the job, and the document falls out of it. The signature is a finger on a screen rather than a pad in a van that has to come back to the office. In the deployment Unibuild is built on, engineers have completed 244 fire door records, 197 call-outs and 294 site diary entries this way.
Can the system email the certificate to the client automatically?+
It can email documents from the system, and every send is logged with the attachment and the exact message body. Be aware that this is wired into specific screens rather than being a universal button on every document, so expanding it to the documents you send most often is part of the configuration work. We would rather tell you that now than have you discover it in month two.
What happens to the documents we already have?+
They stay documents. Unibuild does not need to swallow your historic PDFs to be useful, and forcing a migration of years of certificates is usually a bad use of money. The normal approach is to run Unibuild from a cut over date and keep the historic archive where it is, with the option of loading specific historic records where there is a live compliance reason to have them in one place.
Can two people create the same document number?+
No. A single generator issues each series, zero padded and sequential per document family, and the reference field on the form is not editable. That removes an entire class of problem that a shared spreadsheet creates every time two buyers have it open at once. At go live your existing numbering can be continued from wherever your current system left off, so there is no gap and no duplication in your references on day one.
Next step

Bring the list of documents
your business has to produce.

The exercise We will show you which we already generate and what the rest would take Line by line
Show me my documents → See the registers behind them
Phone · UK hours
+44 7587 557546
Email
[email protected]
Where they are made
The field app
Demo calendar
unibuild.co.uk/demo