Report

Understand how BrightChecker turns inspections into reports

This page explains how reporting works in BrightChecker — from the report layout associated with your checklist, through reviewing and generating the finished report, to adapting or creating your own report design.

It is not a step-by-step, button-by-button guide. Instead, it explains how the reporting process works, what you get as standard, and how much control you have when you need something more specialised.

Key takeaways

Every checklist has an associated report layout. The layout may be simple or highly specialised, depending on what the checklist needs to produce.
You don’t have to design a report. Use the associated layout as supplied and generate your report from the completed inspection.
You can change the supplied layout. Adapt it to your own requirements using the graphical Report Builder.
You can create a completely bespoke report. Design one from scratch, or ask BrightChecker to build it for you.
Your reports can be completely white-labelled. You control the branding, graphics, colours, fonts and layout.
Reports can be generated as interactive web reports or PDFs.
If an approved survey needs changing, you can send it back to Review, make the changes, approve it again and generate a new report instance.

What is a BrightChecker report?

The inspection captures the information. The report turns that information into the finished document or online report that you can give to your customer, client, landlord, tenant or other third party.

BrightChecker connects the two.

Your checklist determines what you inspect and capture. Its associated report layout determines how that information is turned into the finished report.

That means reporting is part of the inspection process from the beginning rather than something you have to work out afterwards.

Your report comes with your checklist

Every BrightChecker checklist has an associated report layout.

The layout depends on what the checklist is designed to do.

A straightforward checklist may have a relatively simple report containing a cover sheet, table of contents, category index, inspection questions and responses, photographs or video, and a back sheet.

A specialist checklist may need something considerably more advanced — particular chapter or section headings, disclaimers, graphics, photographs, summaries or a specific structure for presenting the inspection information.

The associated report layout can be designed to meet those requirements.

You therefore don’t start with a blank report designer. The checklist comes with a report layout ready to use.

This also applies to AI-generated checklists. When BrightChecker creates the checklist, it creates the associated report layout too.

Use the report as supplied

If the associated report layout does exactly what you need, that’s all you have to do.

Complete the inspection, review and approve the survey, then generate the report.

You don’t need to learn the Report Builder or design anything yourself.

This is the easy route: use the checklist, complete the inspection and get the report.

Complete the inspection, review it, generate the report

Once an inspection has been completed, it goes through the review process before the report is generated.

The approved inspection provides the information used to create the report.

From the Survey Tracker, when the survey is ready for reporting, you can generate the report. BrightChecker creates the finished report using the approved inspection data and the associated report layout.

The generated report then appears in the Reports area.

What can the report contain?

The report layout controls what information from the inspection is included and how it is presented.

You can decide what appears in the report and what doesn’t, including things such as:

Inspection questions and responses
Categories and category indexes
Photographs and video
Summaries
Additional graphics
Section and chapter pages
Table of contents
Cover and back sheets
Other inspection data

You can also control the order in which information appears.

The report does not have to follow the exact order in which the inspection was carried out. Information captured later in the inspection can, for example, be presented earlier in the finished report.

Adapt the report to suit your business

The report layout supplied with a checklist isn’t locked.

If you want to change it, BrightChecker’s Report Builder gives you a graphical environment for adapting the design.

You can change the structure, move content around, add or remove elements and control how the finished report looks.

You can control things such as:

Fonts and text sizes
Colours
Headers
Branding
Graphics
Section layouts
Table of contents
Category index
Inspection data
Photographs and video
AI-generated summaries

You can adapt the supplied layout as much or as little as you want.

Make the report completely your own

BrightChecker gives you control over the visual design of the finished report.

You can create your own covers, back sheets, section pages, graphics, headers, colours, fonts and layouts. You can place inspection data, photographs, summaries and other content wherever you want it.

In practice, this means your reports can be completely white-labelled.

There is no requirement to use a fixed BrightChecker report design or to make the finished report look like it came from BrightChecker.

If you want your company logo, colours, branding, graphics and particular style throughout the report, you can build it that way.

The Report Builder is a graphical design tool, so you are not restricted to a small selection of predefined report formats. You can draw and design what you need.

See the report with real inspection data

You don’t have to design a report layout completely blind.

A completed survey can be attached while you work on the report layout, allowing you to see the design populated with actual inspection data.

You can therefore see how questions, responses, photographs and other captured information work within the finished design while you are building it.

Create a completely bespoke report

Sometimes adapting an existing layout isn’t enough.

You can create a report layout from scratch when you need complete control over the design and structure.

This is particularly useful for specialist inspections where the finished report has to follow a particular format or contain specific sections, graphics, disclaimers, summaries or other content.

And you don’t necessarily have to build it yourself.

If you need a bespoke report but would rather have BrightChecker do the work, we can build it for you.

If you need to change the inspection

Sometimes you approve a survey and then realise that something needs changing.

You can reopen the survey and send it back to the Review stage.

Make the required changes, approve the survey again and then produce the report.

BrightChecker generates a new report instance from the updated survey.

The previous report instance is not simply overwritten, so you can distinguish the newly generated report from the one produced previously.

Every generated report is a report instance

Each time you generate a report, BrightChecker creates a report instance with its own date and time.

If you generate another report later, it creates another report instance rather than replacing the previous one.

This lets you distinguish between reports generated from the same survey at different points in time.

Interactive web reports

BrightChecker can produce an interactive web version of the report.

The web report provides a larger, more interactive way to view the finished inspection.

Readers can use the table of contents and category index to move around the report, open photographs at a larger size and play video where it is included.

The report can be shared with a third party as a web link.

PDF reports

Reports can also be produced as A4 PDFs for downloading, printing or sharing.

Photographs can be viewed at a larger size, and video can remain accessible where supported.

QR codes can also be used to link a printed report to video content, allowing someone holding a paper copy to access the associated video.

Share reports with your customers

A finished report can be shared with customers and other third parties as a web report or PDF.

Where you use the BrightChecker Client Portal, reports can also be made available there.

This allows customers to view their reports without needing to become users of the internal BrightChecker inspection system.

From straightforward reports to completely bespoke designs

There isn’t one report format that every inspection has to use.

A straightforward checklist can have a straightforward report layout.

A specialist checklist can have a specialist report designed around its particular requirements.

And if the supplied layout isn’t what you want, you can adapt it or create something completely different.

So the reporting journey is simple:

Use it → Adapt it → Build your own → Or let BrightChecker build it for you.