The pre-audit walk-round that saves a day

Most audit days lose their first hour to things nobody needed an auditor to find. A fire door propped open with a bin. A cupboard on an escape route that has quietly become a store. A certificate that expired in the spring and was never chased. None of these need expertise to spot, yet they consume the attention of the one person in the building best placed to look at harder questions. A short walk-round the day before, done by someone who knows the building, clears that ground in advance.

The point is not to pre-empt the audit or to dress the building up. It is to remove the noise so the formal inspection can do what only it can do: test whether the systems behind the building actually work, not whether someone left a fire exit blocked on the morning the auditor arrived.

Why the day before, and not the day itself

A walk-round on the audit morning is a rush. People are arriving, the auditor is setting up, and anything you find you cannot fix in time. Doing it the day before gives you a working day to close the small things, order the missing part, or at least record honestly what is outstanding and why. That last point matters more than it sounds. An auditor who arrives to find a known defect already logged, with a date and an owner against it, reads that very differently from a defect they discover that nobody had noticed.

The pre-audit walk-round is also a chance to check that the evidence trail is where it should be. Half of audit friction is not the building at all; it is the half-hour spent hunting for the last fire risk assessment, the lift examination report, or the door inspection records. If those live in one place you can confirm in ten minutes that the record matches the asset.

A simple route to follow

Walk the building the way a problem would travel through it: from the entrance, up the protected staircase, along each floor, into the plant and service areas, and out to the boundary. Look at the things that move or get used, because those are the ones that drift out of compliance between formal checks.

• Escape routes and final exits: clear, unlocked, nothing stored on them.
• Fire doors on the route: closing fully, not wedged, no obvious damage to seals or closers.
• Signage and emergency lighting: present, legible, and the right way round.
• The secure information box, where the building has one, and whether its contents are current.
• Plant rooms and risers: housekeeping, no combustible storage, access maintained.
• Recent works: any refit, partition or new tenant that the plans and assessments have not caught up with.

You are not assessing any of these to a standard on the walk-round. You are asking a blunter question: is there anything here that an inspection should not have to discover for me.

Tie it to the documents you already hold

The buildings most exposed at audit are the ones where the physical reality and the paper record have drifted apart. A partition went in last year and the floor plan still shows open-plan. A door was replaced and the inspection register still lists the old one. A walk-round is the cheapest moment to catch that drift, because you are standing in front of the asset with the record in your hand.

For high-rise residential buildings this is not housekeeping but a legal requirement. Under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023, responsible persons of high-rise residential buildings must keep hard-copy floor plans and a single-page orientation plan, together with the responsible person's contact details, in a secure information box for the fire and rescue service, and must carry out monthly checks of firefighters' lifts and key firefighting equipment. A pre-audit walk-round is a natural moment to confirm the box exists, the plans inside it are the current ones, and the monthly checks have actually been recorded rather than assumed. Keeping your building plans and your compliance calendar in step with the building as it changes is what makes that confirmation a five-minute job rather than a scramble.

What to do with what you find

The discipline is in the follow-through, not the finding. Anything you can fix before the auditor arrives, fix. Anything you cannot, record properly: what it is, where it is, when you found it, who owns it, and the realistic date it will close. That record is worth keeping whether or not the auditor ever asks for it, because it becomes the start of your corrective-action trail.

The buildings that audit well are rarely the ones that did something clever the night before. They are the ones where the walk-round confirmed what the manager already believed to be true. When the record and the building agree, the formal audit becomes a test of judgement rather than a search for surprises, and the day it saves is a real one.

A habit, not an event

Done once, before one audit, the walk-round saves a morning. Done as a standing habit on a quiet cadence between audits, it stops most findings from ever reaching an audit at all. The cost is an hour of someone's attention; the return is an inspection that spends its time where your building is genuinely at risk, rather than on the bin propping open a fire door. None of this is legal advice, and the live position should always be checked, but as a working practice it is hard to beat for the effort involved.