A practical audit cadence for a mixed portfolio

Managing one building is a scheduling problem you can hold in your head. Managing forty, of different heights, ages, tenures and uses, is a different kind of problem, and the temptation is to solve it by imposing one timetable on everything. Every building audited each spring, every fire risk assessment reviewed each autumn, one cadence to rule them all. It is administratively neat and operationally wrong. A mixed portfolio contains buildings whose risk and rate of change differ by an order of magnitude, and a cadence that treats them identically will over-serve the quiet ones and under-serve the demanding ones. A practical cadence bends to each building while staying simple enough to actually run.

The problem with one timetable for everything

A single annual cycle assumes the portfolio is homogeneous. It is not. A higher-risk residential tower under the Building Safety Act 2022, at least 18m or at least 7 storeys with at least two residential units, carries duties, occupant numbers and consequences that a two-storey converted house in multiple occupation does not. A building mid-remediation is changing weekly; a stable block has not changed in years. Force both onto the same date and you spend effort where it is not needed while a higher-risk building waits its turn behind buildings that could safely have waited behind it. The neatness of one timetable is bought with misallocated attention, which in compliance terms is the only resource that matters.

Sort the portfolio before you schedule it

The first move is not to set dates but to band the buildings by risk and rate of change. A workable banding might look like this.

The bands are not permanent. A band C building entering remediation moves to band A for the duration; a band A building that completes works and settles may drift back toward B. The banding is a living judgement, reviewed periodically, not a one-off sort.

Separate the statutory clocks from the discretionary ones

Within each band, some intervals are yours to set and some are fixed by regulation. The fixed ones are not negotiable and should be scheduled first, the same across the portfolio wherever they apply:

• Electrical: under the gov.uk landlord rules, rented homes in England need an electrical inspection at least every five years, with the report to tenants within 28 days and a copy to new tenants before they move in.
• Lifts: under LOLER, lifting equipment carrying people needs a thorough examination every six months, and load-only lifting every twelve months, or as set by a written scheme.
• High-rise residential recurring duties: the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023, require monthly checks of firefighters' lifts and key firefighting equipment, plus the secure information box and shared plans.

These statutory clocks tick at their own rate regardless of band. Your discretionary cadence, the whole-building audits and the fire risk assessment reviews, then wraps around them, tighter for band A and looser for band C.

Stagger to smooth the workload

Even with sensible intervals, a portfolio can pile its work into the same weeks if every building was first audited at the same time. Staggering matters. Spreading audits and reviews across the year so the team faces a steady flow rather than seasonal crunches is what keeps the cadence sustainable. A schedule that is perfect on paper but bunches half the portfolio into March will quietly slip, because nobody can do half a year's audits in a month. The aim is a level workload that the team can actually meet every week of the year. Our note on budgeting for the compliance work you can predict covers the cost side of the same smoothing.

Let triggers override the schedule

A cadence sets the maximum gap between checks. It must not stop you acting sooner when a building changes. A change of use, a façade alteration, a fire, a serious near-miss or a wave of contractor works should pull a building's next audit forward regardless of where it sits in the schedule, and may move it up a band. The schedule is the floor, not the ceiling. A portfolio managed purely by fixed dates, with no mechanism to respond to events, is one bad week away from auditing a building on its scheduled date months after the thing that should have triggered an earlier look.

Make the schedule visible and self-chasing

The reason portfolios drift back toward one blunt timetable is that varied schedules are hard to track by memory. Forty buildings, each with its own band, its own statutory clocks and its own triggers, cannot be held in anyone's head. This is precisely the work a compliance calendar should carry: every building's next audit, every statutory deadline, every triggered review, surfaced before it is due and chased if it slips. When the system holds the cadence, you can afford a schedule that reflects real risk rather than one flattened for the sake of being rememberable.

This is how SAMRISK is built to work across a portfolio: buildings banded by risk, statutory and discretionary intervals scheduled and staggered, triggers that pull dates forward, and a calendar that chases each one. You can see the shape on the audits, compliance calendar and buildings pages. A practical cadence is not the same date for everything. It is the right interval for each building, smoothed across the year, and carried by something that will not forget.