Build your own checklist for every inspection

A customer on trial asked us a fair question a few weeks back: could HireCheck do a pre-hire checklist instead of just an overall condition score? He runs a mini excavator and trailer hire business in Queensland, and he already had a paper form he'd built up over time, one list of checks for excavators, a different one for trailers, a third for loaders.

The overall condition rating (excellent, good, fair, poor) is fast, but it's a single judgement call. It doesn't tell you whether the hydraulic hoses were checked, whether the tracks were inspected, or whether the fuel level was recorded. For a lot of hire businesses that's fine. For businesses running a formal on/off-hire process, it wasn't enough on its own.

How it works

Under Settings, there's now a Checklist page. Add whatever items matter for your equipment, in whatever order you want: general condition, visible damage, tracks or tyres, hydraulic hoses and couplers, whatever your process already covers. Reorder them, rename them, remove them, all without touching a single past inspection.

Once you've added at least one item, it shows up automatically on every inspection, on the staff dashboard and on the mobile inspection page your team uses out in the yard. Each item has a quick OK / N/A choice on one line, plus a free-text box underneath for anything that needs following up. Leave it blank if there's nothing to flag; type something in and the item's automatically marked as needing attention, whatever the OK/N/A toggle happens to be set to.

Why N/A matters

One shared checklist across different equipment types only works if items that don't apply can be dismissed cleanly, rather than forcing a false "OK" on something that was never relevant to that machine. A trailer doesn't have a fuel level. An excavator doesn't have a jockey wheel. N/A means one list can cover a mixed fleet without your inspectors having to guess what to do with items that don't fit.

Results show up everywhere the inspection does

Checklist answers aren't tucked away somewhere separate. They show on the equipment's inspection history, in the single-inspection PDF download, in the damage-claim pack (pre-hire and return side by side), and on the condition report link you send to customers. Anything flagged for attention carries its note along with it, so it's visible wherever that inspection turns up.

You don't have to start from a blank list

New accounts now come with a 12-item starter checklist already loaded, deduped from a real hire firm's paper on/off-hire form: general condition, visible damage, tracks or tyres, hydraulic hoses and couplers, fluid and fuel levels, and a handful of others. It's a starting point, not a fixed list. Rename anything, delete what doesn't apply to your gear, add what's missing.

If your account predates this feature and your checklist is empty, there's a Load starter checklist button on the Checklist settings page that adds the same 12 items in one click.

We also made the feature harder to miss. If you haven't set a checklist up yet, you'll see a prompt right on the inspection form itself, not just a page that quietly does nothing extra. Admins get a reminder on the dashboard too, dismissible if you'd rather set it up later.

What we didn't build, yet

The obvious next step is letting different equipment categories carry their own checklist, so excavators and trailers each get exactly the list that applies to them, no N/A required. We've held off on that for now. It's a bigger change, and we'd rather see how the shared-list-with-N/A approach holds up in practice first. If enough hire businesses ask for per-category lists, that's the next thing we'll build.

That's generally how features get added here: someone tells us what's actually missing, and we build it. If there's something that would make an inspection more useful for how you run things, get in touch.