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Managing your LOLER inspections with Papertrail
Managing your LOLER inspections with Papertrail

How to use the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination certificate

Charlotte Cannon avatar
Written by Charlotte Cannon
Updated over a week ago

Please note - this help article is for the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination certificate, which is available to customers on our Equipment, Compliance and Risk customers. If you are a legacy customer and only have access to the old LOLER certificate, please contact support.

If you're a work-at-height company in the UK, chances are that you will have some lifting equipment that falls under the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER).

As well as having a competent person to thoroughly examine your items, you need to provide evidence via a report of thorough examination which contains all the information according to Schedule 1 of LOLER.

Papertrail has a built-in inspection checklist and associated LOLER Report of Thorough Examination certificate specifically for this purpose.

In advance of your first LOLER examination you can be reminded of the examination by editing the LOLER next examination date field on all applicable records.

Checklist

To use the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination checklist, you must first assign the checklist to the relevant records.

Once it is assigned to the records, it will appear as an option when you add an inspection to those records.

If you have another checklist assigned to the record as well as the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination checklist, you will need to select which checklist you are wanting to use. Click on the dropdown arrow to pick your checklist.

Please note - The remove button will only remove the checklist from the inspection, not the record itself.

The LOLER Report will only pull through the information from the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination checklist.

Fill in the sections about which category, defects, testing and when the next LOLER examination is due. You can use the blue downwards arrow to copy down the information when reporting mutable records at once.

Leave comments with the pen icon and upload supporting images/files against each check. Comments will only display in the report if made in the checklist.

Finally, select the overall state for that record and leave any overall comments / uploads.

Please note - If you’ve selected Time-limited defect, in the Next LOLER examination date section you will need to select Other. And then adjust the next inspection date manually to the date by which it could become such a danger. Likewise, if you do not wish to adjust the next LOLER examination date by 6 or 12 Months, select Other and adjust the next inspection date manually.

Certificate

After you have saved the inspection(s), you can produce a LOLER Report of Thorough Examination.

The LOLER report of Thorough Examination has been designed to present the negative outcomes first such as Missing, Quarantine and Monitor - Safe for use, the status will also be highlighted Red, Orange or Green.

Should you choose to include comments in the Defect or Testing sections of the checklist then this information will be present along with your chosen response.

Please note - The certificate will only display comments if they’ve been added. On records that have a missing state, no comments will be displayed.

The examination report will also provide the relevant detail for your equipment directly from the record for information such as Name, Serial, Safe Working Load, the last, this and next examination dates.

You will need to fill in the standard LOLER Report of Thorough Examination certificate details.

  • Name of Competent Person

  • Competent Person's Address

  • Competent Person's Qualifications

  • Employment Status (dropdown)

  • Name and Address of Equipment Owner

  • Name and Address of Where The Examination Took Pace

Once this information is complete, click Open and your report will display.

As the LOLER report of thorough examination is a certificate, you can retrieve a copy of the examination at any time, there is a digital log against the record, you can either search for this in a specific record's history or by filtering the activities tab.

The LOLER Report of Thorough Examination will show the results of the checklist above including any comments or images. It will also show fixed record information: name, serial, Safe Working Load (SWL), who logged the last inspection and when, state.

If you're looking for custom information to be displayed in a certificate or report for your business, contact the Support Team.

Multiple inspection schedules

We recognise that many of your lifting equipment items need to have more frequent visual inspections in addition to the 6 or 12-month thorough examinations. So we've built features in the accounts to make both possible.

When you first add records to your account, set the inspection frequency as the most regular interval. This will determine the period that the notify date and next check date will update by following each inspection, and these will show up in your Records Due and Records Overdue filters once the dates have passed.

There is also another field in the record for the Next LOLER examination date. By selecting either 6 months or 12 months in the last section of the LOLER Report of Thorough Examination checklist, it will automatically change this Next LOLER examination date to 6 or 12 months on from the existing date. This date field links to another set of filters called LOLER Due and LOLER Overdue. This means you can keep your inspection schedules separate and still be alerted when they are coming up or are overdue.

Top tip: if you don't want the LOLER checklist to appear every time you add an inspection, assign the 'Routine check' checklist to the same records. The choice between two or more checklists will stop one from automatically appearing.

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Still can't find the answer you need? We'd love to help!
Contact our Customer Support Team via the chat button in the lower right corner of the screen, on +44 (0)1248 719270 or at support@papertrail.io.

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