Inspection types and templates

Three related pages: what you inspect, what you inspect it against, and the defaults every job inherits.

Inspection types

Settings → Inspection types decides which kinds of property appear when a job is created.

Commercial work arrives with a standard set — office, retail, hospitality, industrial, institutional, mixed-use — which you can switch off if you never do them, and you can add your own alongside. Each type shows how many templates and how many inspections currently use it, so switching one off is a decision made with the count in front of you rather than a guess.

Templates

Needs: templateCreate to add one · templateImport to bring one in · templateDelete to remove one

Editing is separate again, and on by default for inspectors — the reasoning is in Adding team members and setting permissions.

A template is the form an inspection is recorded on: sections, items, and the canned comments behind the rated ones. The nine item types and how an inspector works through them are in Writing an inspection report.

Three things belong here rather than there:

• Attach templates to services. A service that names its template means nobody chooses a form at the door — see Services and pricing.
• Importing goes through the migration wizard, one front door for templates and everything else that comes over from another system. It is a link from this page, not a separate paste-box: see Switching from Spectora.
• Installing one somebody else wrote — templates, comment packs and statutory forms all arrive from the same shelf: see Your content library and the marketplace.

Items can sit under other items

An item can be a sub-item of the one above it — a water heater under Plumbing, a garage door opener under Garage — up to two levels below the top.

• + Add item always adds at the top level, because it sits at the end of the list and the end of the list is the end of the top level. Nesting is an action on a row, from its … menu, and the new sub-item lands at the end of that row's own group.
• The properties panel has a parent picker, which is how an item moves after the fact. It offers Top level explicitly, and it will not offer a parent that is already as deep as it can go, or any of the item's own descendants.
• Deleting a parent asks first, and says how many rows go with it. Deleting a leaf does not ask — a confirmation on every delete makes the ordinary case worse in order to protect the rare one.
• Nesting is drawn with an indent, a guide rail and an outline label that changes alphabet with depth — A, then A.1, then A.1.a — so depth stays readable in a column too narrow for indentation alone to carry it.

A published report prints a sub-item inside its parent's card rather than as another entry in a flat list, which is the point of nesting it.

A template that declares statutory groups offers neither add. A free item there reaches no box on the authority's form, so what was typed into it would go nowhere and nothing would say so — see State and statutory forms.

Workspace defaults for the editor

Settings → Inspection holds the defaults that shape how the editor behaves for everybody. They are small, and two of them decide whether a report can publish at all.

Setting	What it does
Clone default	What R copies from the last entry — the rating, the rating and notes, or everything
Auto-advance	Whether rating an item jumps to the next one — on keyboard entry only, always, or never — plus the delay before it does
Required defect fields	Whether a defect must name a location, a trade, both, or neither, before the report can publish
Agent repair access	Whether referral agents can open, or build, the repair list
Report link lifetime	How long a delivered report link keeps working
Pinned tags	Up to five tags kept within reach in the editor

Required defect fields is the one that surfaces later, at publish time. What it does not require still shows up — as a warning rather than a block. The publish check itself is in Publishing a report.

Agent repair access defaults to read. What it means from the other side, and why the default changed, is in Your inspections and your inspectors.

How long a report link lives

The default is two years. It is a duration, never a date — which is what makes "expires before it is sent" impossible rather than merely validated against.

Two consequences worth knowing before you change it:

• Changing this changes the next link, not the ones already sent. The policy is read when a link is minted, so links sitting in clients' inboxes keep the expiry they were stamped with. If you need existing links moved, the bulk control on the same page is what does that, and it tells you how many are live.
• Wanting a link dead now is a different action — revoke it, on the inspection's People card. An expiry of zero is not how you say that.

The default was open-ended until August 2026. That changed for the same reason the agent repair default did: "keeps what it had" describes a company that predates the setting and nothing else, and an open-ended link to a homebuyer's report was a decision made on new companies' behalf. Choose never if that is what you want — you will know you did.

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