Version control for building documents that actually holds

A fire risk assessment that is two revisions out of date is worse than no assessment at all, because someone has read it and believed it. The same is true of a floor plan with a fire door in the wrong place, or an asbestos register that predates a refurbishment. Most building documents do not fail because they were never written. They fail because nobody could tell, at a glance, which copy was the live one. Version control is the unglamorous discipline that decides whether your records can be trusted, and it is worth getting right before you worry about anything cleverer.

What version control actually has to prove

For a building document, version control is not just keeping old copies. It has to answer three questions without a meeting: which version is current, what changed between versions, and who approved each one. If your filing answers only the first, you have a naming convention, not version control. The other two are what make a record defensible when someone asks why a decision was made on a particular date.

This matters more under the Building Safety Act 2022, where the golden thread is defined as an accurate, up-to-date digital record of building information held through design, construction and occupation. "Up-to-date" is doing a lot of work in that phrase. A record that cannot show its own history cannot prove it is up to date. It can only assert it.

The failure modes you are designing against

Before fixing anything, name the ways version control breaks in practice. They are familiar:

• The duplicate problem. Three copies of the same plan exist in three folders, each slightly different, and the one on the wall is none of them.
• The filename problem. Files named FRA_final, FRA_final_v2, FRA_FINAL_USE_THIS. The most recent date in the name is not always the most recent document.
• The silent edit. Someone corrects a typo in an approved assessment, and now the approved version and the live version differ with no record of why.
• The orphaned attachment. A plan is emailed to a contractor, marked up, and the marked-up copy becomes the only one with the change. The master never learns.

Each of these is a version-control failure, and each is fixable with the same small set of habits.

A scheme that holds

Good version control for buildings does not need specialist software to start, but it does need rules everyone follows. The table below sets out a workable scheme and what each part is for.

The discipline that ties this together is simple: never edit an approved document in place. If something needs to change, it becomes a new version with its own number, change note and approval. The old version is retired, not overwritten.

Why "keep everything" is not the opposite of "stay current"

People sometimes treat version history as clutter and prune it to keep things tidy. That is a mistake. The value of a versioned record is precisely that the old states survive. When a regulator or an insurer asks what your fire strategy said in March, the answer should be a document you can produce, not a recollection. Retiring an old version is not the same as deleting it. A clear sequence of dated, point-in-time records tells a far stronger story than a single file that quietly moves underneath everyone. We have written more on this in point-in-time records: freezing an audit when it is approved.

Drawings deserve the same rigour as documents

Floor plans and elevations tend to escape version control because they live in a different application from the paperwork. That is exactly why they drift. A plan marked up for a fire risk assessment, or amended after a compartmentation survey, needs the same current marker, version number and approval as the assessment it supports. Otherwise the assessment cites a drawing that no longer exists in its referenced form. Keeping plans inside the compliance record, rather than in a separate drawing folder, removes that gap. The related discipline of keeping plans in step with the building as it changes is worth reading alongside this.

Make the current version impossible to miss

The single most useful property of a version-controlled system is that the current copy is obvious to someone who has never seen the building. If a new manager, a contractor, or an auditor can open the record and immediately see which version is live and when it was approved, the scheme is working. If they have to ask, it is not. Test your own filing against that standard: hand it to someone unfamiliar and watch whether they reach for the right copy without help.

Where the system earns its keep

Version control feels like overhead right up until the moment you need it, which is usually the worst moment to discover you do not have it. A change of managing agent, an enforcement query, an insurance renewal, a serious incident. In each case the question is the same: can you show, with confidence, what your records said at the relevant time. A scheme that names one current copy, numbers every change, records who approved it and keeps the old states intact answers that question in seconds rather than days.

SAMRISK is built so that documents and plans are versioned in place, approvals are dated and owned, and superseded copies are retired rather than lost. You can see how documents and drawings sit together on the building plans and audits pages. The aim is unremarkable on purpose: at any moment, the live version should be the obvious one.