Locations and quick-add
How to register where you are inside a building and capture observations against that location.
Every observation in FRA Flow is anchored to a location. The location is "where in the building you were standing when you spotted this". Locations are the spine of the report's evidence trail; the photo, the risk score, and the recommended action all hang off them.
What a location is
A location is one of nine area types, plus a free-text label and an optional floor number. The area types come from the BS 9792 vocabulary:
- Outside approach
- Entrance lobby
- Stair
- Floor landing
- Flat door
- Bin store
- Plant room
- Roof
- Other
The label is the human-readable name you would write down on a notepad: "Lobby", "Stair A", "3rd floor landing", "Flat 2B door". Pick something you (and your reviewer) will recognise on the report.
Quick-add chips
The left rail of the workbench has a row of quick-add chips for the area types you hit on every visit: Outside, Lobby, Stair A, Stair B, Bin store, Plant, Roof. Tap a chip and FRA Flow creates the location with a sensible default label and floor.
Quick-add saves time on the boilerplate so you only have to type the labels that need real thought (flat doors with unit numbers, named landings, atypical spaces).
Adding a flat door or floor landing
Flat doors and floor landings are added per-floor. The locations panel has a floor row at the top of the list (1st, 2nd, 3rd ...); tap + Floor landing under the relevant floor and the location is created with the floor number prefilled. Same flow for + Flat door, with a label like "Flat 3B door".
Why anchor observations to locations
Three reasons:
- The report cites locations, not coordinates. Saying "an 8 mm gap was observed on the strike side of the FD30S door on the 3rd floor landing" is more defensible than "a fire door issue was found".
- Reviewers scan by location. When the reviewer reads the draft and wants to confirm a paragraph, the Show source panel groups observations by location so the reviewer can mentally walk the building.
- Action plans group by location. Two issues at the same flat door land in the same row of the action plan, not scattered.
Editing and deleting locations
Tap the more-menu on a location row to rename it, or remove it. Removing a location is blocked if any observations are attached; either move the observations to a different location first, or delete them.
Picking the right location is more important than picking the right section
A common pattern: the assessor starts on the wrong BS 9792 section when capturing an observation, then later corrects it. That is fine; sections can be reassigned without the report re-ingesting the observation.
What is harder to fix is an observation against the wrong location. Reviewers spot this and lose trust. Take the extra two seconds to register the location before tapping + Observation, even if it feels like overhead.
Where to go next
- Photo capture covers the camera flow and the auto-classification of evidence categories.
- Voice notes covers transcription and structuring of recorded observations.
- Risk levels explains how Low / Medium / High map to the report and the action plan.
Next
Photo capture →