Pre-completion inspection, level nine, fourteen apartments, sixty-odd questions per unit. The inspector walks it on a Tuesday with a checklist app, the kind that produces a tidy PDF at the end with green ticks and red crosses. Thirty-one crosses across the level. Good inspection. Thorough.
Thursday night, the site manager sits down with the PDF on one screen and the defect register on the other and starts typing the thirty-one crosses in as defects. Photo from the PDF, dragged across. Location, retyped. Trade, guessed from the question. Gets to twenty-six, the phone rings, comes back and does three more. Two never make it. One of the two is the shower screen in 9.07 that will be disputed at handover, and the record will show the inspector flagged it and nobody raised it.
That inspection app was a form. A very good form. The findings still died on the way to the register.
The opinion
An inspection that cannot raise a defect is a form, and a form is where findings go to be forgotten.
The join between "we found it" and "someone owns fixing it" is the whole point of inspecting. If that join is a person retyping on a Thursday night, it will break, not because the person is careless but because there are thirty-one of them and a phone. The join has to be structural. A No on the checklist has to be a defect, the same record, not a reminder to go and make one.
What that looks like when it is built in
Build the checklist once as a template. Yes or No per question, in the order you walk the unit. Mark the ones that must not be waved through as hold points: the membrane, the fire collar, the balustrade fixings.
Walk the unit. Every answer records who gave it and when. Answer No on the shower screen in 9.07 and a defect exists, linked back to that question, in the register, right then. It gets a trade, a due date, and photos, and it runs the normal lifecycle. Nobody types it twice.
Then the bit that makes it a loop rather than a hand-off. When that defect is verified closed, the question flips back to Yes on its own, and the record shows it was resolved that way rather than re-answered by hand. The checklist and the register cannot drift apart, in either direction, because they are reading the same thing.
Sixty questions times fourteen units is still a long Tuesday. It is just not also a long Thursday.
The sub who has to answer their part
Half the questions on a PC checklist are not the builder's to answer. The waterproofer signs off the membrane. The electrician confirms the RCDs. Usually that means the checklist waits on a phone call, or the sub is handed a login to a system they will open once.
Instead, issue the sub a share link for their stretch of the checklist, with a due date. What they can reach is only the live section: the questions after the last hold point that has been signed off, up to the next one that has not. Not the whole checklist. Their answers come in through exactly the same path an inspector's do, so their No raises a defect the same way, and the record says the answer came through the link rather than pretending a user gave it.
Two rough edges, both deliberate and both annoying the first time. The raw link is shown to you once, when you issue it, in case the email does not land; close that panel and it is gone, and the fix is to re-send. And re-sending retires the old link, so a copy the sub forwarded to their apprentice stops working. People ask why. The answer is that a checklist answer is evidence, and evidence that anyone holding a forwarded link can submit is not.
What you cannot do, and why
You cannot export the checklist itself as a PDF. People ask for this in the first week, every time, because the form app they came from did it.
The reason is that the PDF was the problem. The thing you hand over is a report read from the register: a Door Sheet per location for the walk, a per-defect pack with photos for the purchaser, the full detailed record for your own file. Because every No is already a defect, everything the inspection found is already in what those reports read from. The checklist is the input. The register is the record.
And there is no signature pad. Sign-off is a status change made by a role permitted to make it, which is never the trade that did the work, stamped with a name and a time. Nobody draws a squiggle with a finger. What a claim turns on is who verified it and when, and a status carries that better than a scribble does.
The Thursday night test
If your inspection process has a step where someone sits down after the walk and moves findings from one place to another, that is the step where the shower screen in 9.07 goes missing. Not sometimes. Reliably, at a rate of about two in thirty.
Overdue findings from an inspection across a whole site, with owners and due dates and the one list that shows them, is written up as its own answer on tracking overdue inspection items. The checklist that raises them sits inside the capture-to-handover workflow on the construction defect management page.