Two years later somebody asks you for the file. There is a file.

A lender, a solicitor, an insurer or a buyer. They want the building control certificate, the warranty, the electrical certificate, the air test, the drawings your home was actually built to. Every one of those arrived during your build, from somebody who is no longer answering their phone. This is where each of them went on the day it arrived.

How it fills up

The pack on the build you can look round.

Step 1 of 4

The shelves are named before you need them

Open Completion on day one and it is already laid out: eleven slots with names on them. The building control certificate. The warranty final certificate. The air-permeability test result. The VAT reclaim.

An empty shelf is the useful half. It is the difference between knowing you are missing the ventilation commissioning record while the installer is still on site, and finding out eighteen months later.

The Completion section with its eleven named shelves listed down the page, most of them still empty.

Step 2 of 4

You file it where you already are

Nothing has to be moved into the pack at the end, because nothing was ever anywhere else. A certificate, a photograph, a signed order, a survey: it is filed once, and it sorts itself into thirteen sections in the order a build happens:

The land
Legal
The ground
Design
The specification
Consents
Procurement and instructions
The money
Construction
Health, safety and waste
Connections
Completion
The trades

The completion pack with every section tab across the page and the documents filed under each.

Step 3 of 4

Every revision, not just the latest

Both revisions of the phase plan are there, not just the current one. What was in force in March is a different question from what is in force now, and only one of them can be answered by a folder holding the latest version.

The Health, safety and waste section: the shelves down the page, then a site set-up RAMS and both revisions of the construction phase plan, Rev A and Rev B, each with its own Open link.

Step 4 of 4

The money, against the order it came under

Every application for payment, named with the order it was made against and the valuation number.

Nothing here scores you for the empties. There is no percentage complete, no chasing and no red.

The money section: a consultant's fee invoice and four applications for payment, each named with its order and valuation number.

One file that somebody else can follow, and every original you were ever sent.

Every document this build produced is printed into the one PDF under the section it belongs to, page for page, keeping the page numbers it was issued with. The contents at the front is not a list: each line goes to the page it names.

You choose what travels. Everything is ticked when you open it and you take out what you would rather not include. There is no version called for your lender. A pack assembled for an audience leaves things out by implication, and this one is yours.

What you get out

One PDF

The whole build as a single document, with a contents page you can press and a bookmark spine down the side.

Your originals

Every file you were sent, exactly as you were sent it, in folders that match the sections.

You keep both

They are yours whether you stay subscribed or not, with six months to come back for them.

Start seven days See this one on a real build