Review Cycle
An assessment that is in force is a statement about today, not a permanent one. The review cycle is what makes a module say so out loud: a record that has been in force long enough — or whose subject has changed underneath it — raises a review round, and somebody is asked to look at it again.
All four risk modules share this mechanism. What differs between them is only what counts as "the subject changed"; everything below reads the same in Occupational Health & Safety, Asset Risk, Environmental and Information Security.
Turning it on
Review is a property of the register, not of the individual record. On the main form (the asset risk group, in Asset Risk):
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Review Enabled | Whether records under this register are reviewed at all |
| Review Period | How often, as a recurrence — the same control the periodic action definitions use |
The period is required once the switch is on: a register that asks to be reviewed without saying how often cannot produce a single date, so the save is refused.
When the clock starts
The clock starts as a record comes into force, not when it is created and not when the register's switch is turned on.
A register that has review switched on later reaches the records that come into force after that, not the ones already standing. Those keep no next-review date, so no round is raised for them. This is deliberate — it stops a switch being flipped and hundreds of standing records producing a task each the same night — but it does mean an existing register needs its records to go round once more before they join the cycle.
Answering a round
A round is never answered from a menu. It arrives as a task, under its own tab in the pending-tasks list on the home page — "Risk Reviews", "Asset Risk Assessment Reviews" and so on — and the task opens the review screen.
The screen shows the record whole and read-only, with one field open: Review Note. It is required, because a round closed with nothing written is a round whose reason nobody can reconstruct later.
Two ways out, both in the header:
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Suitable — Close | The round closes with your note, the clock is reset, and the next review date moves forward by the register's period |
| Start Revision | A new revision of the record is opened and you land on its working screen; the round stands down |
Closing a round changes nothing about the record itself — not its status, not its revision number, not a single field. That is the point: "I looked at it and it still holds" is a statement about the review, not a change to the assessment.
What raises a round
| Reason | Raised when |
|---|---|
| Periodic | The next review date has passed |
| Related Record Changed | What the assessment rests on has changed — see below |
| Revision | Recorded, already closed, when a revision comes into force: revising a record is reviewing it |
The "related record changed" source is what differs per module:
| Module | The round is raised when |
|---|---|
| Environmental | A process the assessment covers gains a published revision |
| Information Security | An asset risk assessment the risk is linked to comes into force |
| Asset Risk | The asset the assessment is about is saved — any change to it |
| Occupational Health & Safety | Nothing. Periodic and revision rounds work; no related record is defined for safety risks |
Asset Risk fires on every save of the asset without asking which field moved, because the assessment reads ten of the asset's fields and is scored against the whole of it. That is less noisy than it sounds: a record can only have one open round at a time, so an asset edited five times in a week costs one round, not five.
Reading the history
Every record in force carries a Review panel showing when it was last reviewed, when it is next due, and every round it has been through:
| Column | Reads |
|---|---|
| Created | When the round was raised |
| Status | Open, Cancelled or Closed |
| Reason | Periodic, Related Record Changed or Revision |
| Review Date | When it was answered |
| Reviewed By | Who answered it — or, for a revision round, who started the revision |
| Review Note | What they wrote |
| Revision No | Which round of the record was under review |
The history follows the whole revision chain, not just the round you are looking at. Opening revision three shows what happened in rounds one and two as well, which is usually the question being asked.
What happens to a round when a revision starts
| Moment | The round |
|---|---|
| Revision opened | Stands down — the task disappears from the pending list |
| Revision given up | Comes back, open again, with a fresh task |
| Revision comes into force | A closed Revision round is recorded, and the clock starts again |
The round is never duplicated by any of this: a revision that is opened and abandoned leaves the same round behind it, not a second one.
Related pages
- Risk Management overview — what the four modules share
- Risk Revisions — how a revision works in Occupational Health & Safety
- Task Management — how standing tasks are assigned and completed