Field service compliance

If your trade is regulated, some of what you record is evidence. Compliance is the part of SMG Tools built for that: structured records that cannot be quietly edited afterwards, licenses that warn you before they lapse, and an export in the shape an inspector asks for.

It is off until you turn it on, because most businesses do not need it and an unused compliance module is just extra screens.

Turn it on

An owner enables compliance for the business under the module settings. Once on, the compliance screens appear through the console.

Turning it off again hides the screens and keeps every record. Nothing you recorded is deleted by switching a module off — which is the only safe behavior for something you may have to produce years later.

Decide what has to be recorded

Compliance profiles define what a particular kind of regulated work must capture — the fields that are always required, plus the ones specific to that profile.

Profiles are fixed and versioned. You do not edit them, and that is the point: a record written against a profile two years ago still means exactly what it meant then, which is what makes a set of records comparable at all.

You attach profiles to kinds of work, and from then on a new job of that kind carries them automatically. You can also attach one to an individual job for an edge case, and detach one — unless entries have already been made against it, in which case detaching would orphan evidence.

Keep a catalog of regulated materials

List the regulated materials you use — consumables, chemicals and refrigerants — with their regulatory identifiers, ingredient and signal information, default units and dilution defaults. You can archive one you no longer carry and restore it later.

A compliance entry keeps a copy of the material’s details as they were when it was recorded. If you later correct a product code in the catalog, last year’s record still says what was actually true at the time. A record that silently updates itself is not evidence.

Physical equipment is not a material. Where a serial number has to be on the record — a piece of HVAC equipment, say — it is a field on the profile rather than a catalog entry.

Track who is licensed to do the work

Licenses belong to your workers. A worker with at least one active license is what the screens call a technician — it is a description of their licenses rather than a job title you assign, so it is always current by definition.

A worker can hold several licenses at once. Your business’s own licenses are tracked separately and support operating across several states.

A business license can be published on your public page as a trust signal, if you choose. Worker licenses are never shown publicly.

Be warned before a license lapses

Expiry reminders run daily and warn you ahead of time, for both worker licenses and your business’s own. Finding out a license expired last week from a regulator is the situation this exists to prevent.

Capture the work in the field

On a job carrying a profile, the crew fills in the structured record that profile defines, rather than a free-text note. Same fields, same order, same meaning, every time — which is what makes a year of records reportable instead of a year of prose.

Lock what is finished

A finalized compliance record is protected. It is validated before it can be finalized, locked after, and any later change is kept as an amendment with its history rather than overwriting what was there.

That is the difference between a record and a note. A note anybody can revise afterwards proves nothing; a locked record with a visible amendment trail is what holds up.

Export what a regulator asks for

Compliance reports export as CSV in a regulator-facing shape, and the console surfaces where your compliance risk actually is — what is missing, what is expiring — rather than leaving you to find out during an inspection.