If you are responsible for fire doors, you are responsible for proving they have been checked. The law cares less about the format of that proof than most people assume: in the majority of buildings, a paper file of inspection sheets is still perfectly legal. So why are inspection companies, housing providers and facilities teams moving to digital systems anyway?
This guide compares the two approaches honestly: what the law actually requires, where paper still works, where it falls down, and what a digital system needs to do to be worth the switch.
Start with the legal baseline, because it is narrower than the marketing around "compliance software" suggests.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the Responsible Person must take general fire precautions and be able to demonstrate them. Fire doors form part of those precautions, so you need evidence that they are being maintained in efficient working order. The Order does not say that evidence must be digital.
Regulation 10 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 requires quarterly checks of communal fire doors and annual checks of flat entrance doors, on a best endeavours basis, in residential buildings with a storey over 11 metres. Again, the regulation requires the checks and the ability to show they happened. It does not prescribe a format.
The exception is higher-risk buildings under the Building Safety Act 2022: those at least 18 metres or 7 storeys with two or more residential units. Here the golden thread requirement does specify that safety information must be kept digitally, in a format that is accurate, accessible and transferable. If you manage higher-risk buildings, paper fire door records will not satisfy the golden thread.
So the honest summary is: digital records are legally mandated for higher-risk buildings, and a practical choice everywhere else.
Paper has genuine strengths, and pretending otherwise undermines the case for change.
It works well when the portfolio is small and stable: a single building, a few dozen doors, one person doing the checks. A printed inspection checklist, completed and filed, is cheap, needs no training, and never has a flat battery or a lost login.
It also works when nothing goes wrong. A folder of signed sheets sitting in a cupboard is fine right up until someone needs to interrogate it.
The problems appear at scale, and they appear under scrutiny.
Finding anything. A fire and rescue authority audit, an insurer query or a leaseholder request means finding a specific door's history across months of loose sheets. With hundreds of doors across multiple buildings, this can take days.
Proving the check happened where and when claimed. A paper sheet is a statement. A digital record with a timestamp, a GPS position and photographs taken at the door is evidence. When an inspection is challenged, the difference is decisive.
Tracking what happens after a failure. A failed check is the start of a process, not the end of one. Paper systems are poor at holding the thread between the defect, the remedial work, and the evidence that the work was done. Defects logged on paper have a habit of being quietly forgotten. Our guide to keeping a fire door register covers why that thread is the heart of the whole exercise.
Scheduling. Quarterly communal checks and annual flat entrance checks across a portfolio produce hundreds of due dates. Paper cannot tell you what is overdue. A spreadsheet can, but only if someone maintains it, and the spreadsheet and the inspection sheets drift apart over time. See our article on inspection frequency for how quickly these schedules compound.
Handover. When buildings change managing agent, or an FM contract changes hands, paper records routinely go missing. The incoming team starts from zero, which usually means a full re-survey at the client's cost.
Not all digital is equal. A folder of scanned PDFs is technically digital and solves almost none of the problems above. A proper fire door inspection system should give you:
If a system does not do these things, you have swapped a paper filing problem for a digital filing problem.
A reasonable rule of thumb: if you manage fewer than around fifty doors in one building and you are the only person involved, paper or a simple spreadsheet can still be defensible, provided it is genuinely kept up to date. The moment you have multiple buildings, multiple people, Regulation 10 frequencies to track, or any higher-risk buildings in the portfolio, the administrative cost and audit risk of paper outgrows its simplicity.
It is also worth thinking about direction of travel. The golden thread principle, that safety information should be digital, current and accessible, currently applies in full to higher-risk buildings, but it reflects where regulation and industry practice are heading generally. Building a digital record now means you are not retrofitting one under pressure later.
This article is general guidance, not legal advice. Your fire risk assessment and the specific duties that apply to your buildings should drive the final decision.
DoorTRACE is fire door inspection software built around exactly the workflow described above. Every door gets a QR identity and a permanent digital history, engineers complete checks with photos and timestamps in the mobile app, schedules and overdue checks are tracked automatically in the portal, and branded reports are generated from the data rather than typed up afterwards. If you are weighing up the move from paper, get in touch and we will walk you through it.
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