Who inspects a venue
Four kinds of inspector can walk in, and each scores different things:
Inspector | What they score |
|---|---|
Food hygiene (the EHO, for your hygiene rating) | Hygiene, meaning how food is handled; Structure, meaning the building and how faults get fixed; Confidence in management, meaning your system, policies and records; and the environment duties alongside them, such as waste. |
Fire (the fire and rescue service) | Fire precautions: the fire log book, the fire risk assessment, drills. |
Health and safety (the council or the HSE) | Safety, meaning accidents, COSHH and the policy; and People, meaning training and inductions. |
Licensing (the licensing authority) | Licence conditions: refusals, capacity and sound. Shown only for licensed venues. |
Paddl calls each inspector a frame and the things they score its elements. Readiness is built around them, so what you see is what the inspector will ask about, in their order.
The Overview
Compliance > Readiness opens on the Overview: one ring per frame, green, amber or red, with how many items are open in that frame and how many documents you have to hand. Pick your sites with the location picker; a manager sees the sites they manage. Under the rings sits your last recorded visit, with its date, the rating if there was one, and how many of its action points are still open.
For a UK business the Overview also shows each site's official food hygiene rating from the FSA, with when it was last inspected. See Your Food Hygiene Rating.
A ring is scored from the checks and evidence a venue like yours is expected to keep. Reports never move a ring, because a quiet month is not a gap, and business records such as the maintenance board never do either. Where an owner has recorded that a kind of record does not apply, it is left out rather than counted against you.
One page per inspector
Each frame has its own page under Readiness, grouped by the elements that inspector scores. Under each element you see every line that proves it: the checks, with done, late and missed over the period; the evidence, with its next expiry; reports, with how many await review or need action; the risk assessment, with how many of the required signatures are in place; and, for the EHO, the action plan from the last report. A missing line shows a dot, as on the Records page. A red line is a check that has been missed or evidence that has expired.
Every line links to the place you fix it. A check or a report opens its section's Records page, such as Food Safety > Records or Health & safety, on that chip; evidence opens Documents on that category; a risk assessment opens Risk assessments. Readiness shows you where you stand; the work happens on those pages.
Alongside the scored lines, an element can cite the business registers an inspector reads: the maintenance board and the issues log under Structure, the complaints register under Confidence in management. They show how many items are open, and never move the ring.
Visits and internal audits
Visits lists every inspection report you have filed under Documents, with its date, its rating and the state of its action plan, so you can see how the last visit went and what is left from it. See Turning an EHO Report into an Action Plan.
Internal audits holds the audits and compliance checks your own team carries out between official visits, with their results. It used to be the Inspections item in the sidebar.
Licensing
The Licensing page appears only when a site in view has a licensed venue type, such as a pub, bar, club or licensed restaurant. A cafe with no licence does not see it, and nothing is being hidden for being empty: there is no inspector to be ready for.
The audit pack
Generate Audit Pack sits in the header of Readiness. It builds one ZIP for a date range and the sections you tick, as described in Generating an Audit Pack. The rings tell you whether you are ready; the pack is what you hand over.
On the day: open the EHO visit page rather than Readiness. It is read-only and built for handing an inspector a tablet. See Preparing for an EHO / Inspection Visit.