Managing documents

Purpose: a Safety Manager keeps the company’s rules and procedures as PDFs, says who must read each one, and sees who has and has not acknowledged it. This is the evidence that the people on a site were told the rules, with no paper and no chasing.

Who: Safety Managers and Org Admins. Readers: see Reading and acknowledging documents.

A document is a PDF made outside Custos (in Word or elsewhere). There are no folders; each document has its own audience. Tags are not available yet.

1. The library

Open Documents, then Library. It lists every document with its audience, whether readers acknowledge it, and “No PDF yet” for one still empty.

2. Add a document

1. Select New document.
2. Enter the title and a description.
3. Readers must acknowledge it: tick it for rules people must confirm; untick it for a document that is only to be read.
4. Who must read it: choose roles (everyone who holds one) and/or people by name (Add a person). Choose at least one role or person. Guests can be in the audience.
5. Select Create. Nobody sees the document until a PDF is uploaded.
6. Upload the PDF: Upload the PDF, choose the file, Upload. A PDF is at most 25 MB.

3. Publish a new version

Open the document’s Versions tab and choose Upload a new version. Say what changes:

• Minor change: a correction such as a typo or a new logo. Acknowledgements already given still count.
• Material change: what the document asks has changed. Everyone must acknowledge it again.

Optionally add a note. The first version always asks everyone to acknowledge. Older versions stay in the list.

4. See who has read it

The Readers tab (the status board) shows “x of y have acknowledged the current version”, and each person’s state:

• Acknowledged (with the version and date)
• Older version only: acknowledged an earlier version, not the current one
• Not yet

Use it to chase the people who have not. For a read-only document it just says how many people read it.

5. Change, archive and restore

• Details tab: change the title, description, audience or whether it needs acknowledgement, then Save. If someone else changed it, Load the latest.
• Archive stops everyone reading it and blocks changes; Restore brings it back. A reader’s acknowledgements are kept.

6. Good practice

• Pick Material only when the content truly changed; each one asks every reader again.
• Choose roles for a rule that applies to everyone in a job; name people for a special case.
• Check the status board after publishing, and again before an audit.

Not built yet: tags, notifying the audience of a new version by email (readers see it in the app), and audiences by site or department.