Reading a sealed record

Opening a sealed record from the evidence register shows exactly what the surveyor captured, panel by panel, in the same shape it was sealed in.

What it is

A sealed record’s panels follow the survey itself: property and resident information, the narrative sections your organisation’s App configuration switched on (client instructions, scope of survey, definitions, and every hazard-specific write-up), the hazard-specific findings (room readings for damp & mould, the asbestos register, EICR transcription for electrical, and so on), HHSRS scoring where the hazard type carries it, the floor plan, remedial recommendations and scope of works, and sign-off. Any AI-drafted advisory content that was used along the way is shown too, clearly marked as advisory. Every panel is a read-only reflection of what’s stored — there’s no edit control anywhere on a sealed record.

How to do it

1. Open Evidence and select a record from the register.
2. Work down the panels in order — property and resident details first, then the hazard-specific sections, then HHSRS/floor plan/remedial where the hazard type includes them, then sign-off.
3. Click any photo to open it full-size; each one shows its own capture-time metadata.
4. Check the hash and chain-sequence panel to confirm the record’s position in its property’s evidence chain — see What “sealed” and “tamper-evident” mean.
5. Use Generate report to produce the same content as a branded PDF — see The report.

How it integrates

What you’re viewing is the same data every other surface reads from: the same record that populated the nightly EDI export, the REST API’s GET /v1/surveys/{id}, the survey.finalized webhook payload, and the branded PDF report. Nothing on this screen is recomputed or reformatted differently between those surfaces — they all read the identical sealed fields. If a record was later revised, this view is scoped to one specific version; use the version history to move between them, and see Correcting a sealed record for what a revision actually creates.

Common problems

• A section I’d expect to see is missing. An empty section is omitted entirely from a sealed record’s display, the same way it’s omitted from the printed report — this is expected, not a fault, when nothing was recorded for it.
• The photos look different in the record than on the report PDF. The record view shows every captured photo; the report groups and captions them for print — both draw from the same stored evidence.
• I can’t find an edit control. There isn’t one. A sealed record has no direct edit path — see Correcting a sealed record for the only ways to change what happened after finalising.