Alerts and COSHH records

There are six alert types, and each comes from data already on the row.

Expiring within 90 days. The register looks at expiry or review dates and warns you while there is still time to use the stock or plan its removal. For a school, that makes "Expiring this term" a useful saved view to check before ordering for next year.

Below minimum quantity. Set a minimum on anything you cannot run out of. A technician who gets this alert finds out before the lesson, not during it.

Wrong storage class for location. A location can be set up for a class of stock. When a row's storage class does not fit, the register says so. This is the alert that catches a bottle put back on the wrong shelf.

Incompatibles sharing a location. The register compares what is recorded in a location and flags pairings that should not be together, such as an oxidiser and a flammable. It can only see what has been recorded, so the alert works better the truer your locations are.

Awaiting disposal for over 60 days. Stock marked for disposal has a habit of staying exactly where it is. This alert keeps it in view.

Peroxide formers past their opened-date threshold. Ethers and similar chemicals can form peroxides after opening. This alert depends on someone recording an opened date, which is why the opened date is a field on every row. If an old bottle shows signs of crystals or has no opened date at all, leave it where it is and get advice.

Alerts are shown in the app and sent in a weekly email digest. A weekly summary is deliberate: a store does not need a notification every time a date passes, and people stop reading messages that arrive too often.

The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 require every employer to carry out a risk assessment. HSE sets out the work in five stages: identify the hazards, assess the risks, control the risks, record your findings and review your controls. Employers with five or more employees must record the significant findings, and HSE says the record must be accessible so that safety representatives and inspectors can examine it.

There is no fixed review interval. HSE describes an absolute requirement to review regularly, with the timing depending on the type of risk, the work and the employer's judgement. A review is also needed when staff, processes, substances or equipment change, or after an accident, a near miss or a concern raised by a worker. It need not repeat the whole assessment, and only the parts that no longer reflect the situation have to be amended.

Software cannot do that thinking. What it can do is make the first stage reliable, and make it obvious when something has changed. Our COSHH guide covers the regulations in more depth.

The hazardous substances register is one of the standard reports. It lists what your organisation holds along with the hazard information the register has for each chemical, as a PDF or XLSX. You can run it for the whole site or for a single location.

For most establishments this becomes the list a COSHH assessment starts from. It answers the question that gets asked first: what have you got, and where? It will not cover everything. COSHH also applies to things that do not sit on a shelf, such as fumes and dusts produced by the work, and biological agents. HSE also notes that lead, asbestos and radioactive substances have their own regulations.

The AI assistant can draft hazardous substances register entries and storage risk notes from the hazard data. They arrive marked as drafts for the competent person to sign.

Hazard data alone describes a substance. An assessment has to describe your use of it: how much, how often, by whom, in what room, with what ventilation, and whether students are involved. A draft can save someone from typing the H statements for the fortieth time. It cannot know that your fume cupboard is due for its examination. HSE's guidance refers to someone with the necessary skills, knowledge and experience, and that person needs to read and correct every draft before signing it.

A signed note should be one a person is prepared to defend. If a draft says something that is wrong for your setting, change it.

An alert should lead somewhere. An expired or surplus bottle can be marked as awaiting disposal, which adds it to the list a disposal request draws on. A storage mismatch is resolved by moving the bottle and recording the location change, which appears in the row's history. A low-quantity alert is usually a reminder to order.

Whichever it is, the change writes an audit entry. If an inspector asks how you manage expiring stock, you can show what the alert said, who acted on it and when. A policy document can describe your process, and the audit trail can show it being followed.

Alerts rely on data. If a bottle has no expiry date, it cannot alert. If a chemical was shelved in the wrong place without anyone recording it, the register still thinks it is in the right one. That is why alerts and stock checks go together: the walk corrects the record, and the record drives the alerts.

An alert is also not a verdict. A date on a bottle does not always mean the contents have become dangerous, and the absence of an alert does not mean a bottle is safe. Your own risk assessment and your supplier's safety data sheet stay in charge.