The sector varies. The shape doesn't: more than one building, a statutory regime that doesn't care how busy you are, and a compliance position currently held together by one very capable person and a spreadsheet.
Almost every estate we talk to describes the same progression. It starts with a spreadsheet, which works. Then sites are added, and the spreadsheet acquires tabs. Then someone leaves, and it turns out only they understood the colour coding. Nothing dramatic ever happens — until an inspection, an incident or an insurance claim asks a question the spreadsheet can't answer quickly. The use cases below are different industries telling the same underlying story.
A regulated environment with a dense statutory load — fire safety and drills, water systems and legionella, hoists and lifting equipment, nurse call, electrical and gas — spread across homes that each run slightly differently. The registered manager is accountable, but the evidence usually lives with whoever last did the paperwork.
Commercial kitchens, gas interlocks, extract systems, pools and spas, lifts, boilers and a fire strategy that has to work with the public in the building. Sites are geographically scattered, general managers change, and maintenance history tends to live in a folder in the back office of one hotel.
A trust central team is answerable for compliance across sites it does not physically visit, staffed by people whose main job is not facilities. Estates data arrives inconsistently, and the annual return is assembled from whatever each school can find.
Individually a branch has a modest compliance load. Multiplied by fifty, it becomes an operation — and the failure mode is not a dramatic breach but a slow drift, where nobody notices that eleven sites are overdue because nobody is looking at all fifty at once.
Gas safety, electrical condition, fire risk assessments and their actions — held against units, blocks and communal areas, and demanded at short notice by tenants, insurers, lenders and regulators. The work is usually done; the difficulty is proving it quickly and completely.
Lifting equipment under LOLER, pressure systems, local exhaust ventilation, fixed wiring, fork-lift fleets and racking inspections — all on equipment that production cannot spare. Missing an inspection is both a legal exposure and a shutdown risk.
An FM provider carries someone else's compliance obligation and has to evidence delivery contractually. Reports come back from a dozen subcontractors in a dozen formats, and the effort of turning them into a client-ready picture is where the margin quietly goes.
Practices, clinics and health centres carrying medical gas, water safety, ventilation, lifting and electrical obligations — usually managed part-time by a practice manager alongside everything else, with documents scattered across email and a shared drive.
Compliance software is easy to oversell, so here is the honest version. If you run a single building with a handful of statutory items and a calendar reminder that has never once let you down, a platform is overhead you don't need yet — and we'll say so.
The same goes if your real problem is that the work isn't being done. Software makes an undone check visible; it doesn't do the check. Fixing the operation comes first, and a system installed on top of a broken process just produces a very tidy record of the wrong thing.
Where PriComp earns its place is the third case: the work is being done, mostly, by people who care — and nobody can prove it quickly, spot what's slipped early, or carry on when the person holding it all takes a fortnight off.
You recognise the need when: answering “is site 7 compliant?” takes more than a minute; the certificate exists but nobody can find it; a remedial from three months ago surfaces in an unrelated meeting; two people give a different overdue count; or the annual return is assembled by asking every site to check its own folder. None of those are catastrophes. All of them are the same missing thing — one register everyone works from.
Twelve questions across compliance, assets, remediation and evidence — and an honest read on whether you have a software problem or an operations one.