What the duty asks of software
Government guidance frames the golden thread around principles: information that is accurate and trusted, kept up to date, stored digitally and securely, available to the right people, understandable to a competent person, and durable for the building's whole life. Read as software requirements, those principles become concrete and testable:
- A single source of truth - one live record per installation, not competing copies in inboxes and shared drives
- Kept current - when a drawing is revised, the records on it stay correctly mapped instead of silently going stale
- Digital and durable - structured data that will still open, search and export in ten years, not a folder of PDFs named FINAL_v3
- Available to the right people - the client and the person accountable for the building can see the records, not just the contractor who made them
- Secure - held with proper access control, in a known jurisdiction, by an organisation that takes its own security seriously
- Trusted - a tamper-evident history, so a reviewer years later can tell the evidence is what it was on the day it was captured
Not every records app qualifies
A generic forms app with a camera does produce digital records, and that is where many contractors start. The golden thread tests are where the gap shows. Can a competent stranger verify an installation from the record alone - location on the current drawing, tested system, installer, photographs, status? Does the evidence survive handover, or does it live and die with the contractor's subscription? And can anyone prove the record hasn't been tidied up after the fact? A tool can be genuinely useful on site and still fail all three tests. The duty is about what the building can rely on later, not what the contractor found convenient at the time.
How Assaya was built for this
Assaya was built by working fire-stopping installers at Rockfirepro Ltd, for the trades that put the fire protection in: fire stopping, fire doors, fire dampers, intumescent coating and board encasement, all native. Against the tests above: every record is pinned to a controlled drawing revision and captured once, at the point of work, offline if need be. Every record carries a hash-chained, tamper-evident history, so any change is visible and the chain proves nothing was silently rewritten. Photographs captured in the app carry their reference, location and UTC capture time burned into the image itself - provenance that survives a screenshot, a print, or a paste into someone else's report. And the evidence is not locked in the contractor's pocket: alongside the field app and admin console there is a client-facing golden-thread portal, so the people responsible for the building can see the records directly, and exports mean the evidence leaves cleanly whenever it needs to.
On the security leg: UK-hosted in a London data centre, ICO-registered (ZC191719), Cyber Essentials certified. On honesty: Assaya is golden-thread ready - built to support the record-keeping duties the Act creates. It is not "Building Safety Act certified", because no such certification exists, and we would rather tell you that than borrow authority from legislation.
Below 18 metres, the thread still pays
The strict statutory duty applies to higher-risk buildings, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But Regulation 38 has long required fire safety information at handover on far more buildings, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 added recurring fire door checks in residential buildings over 11 metres, and main contractors, insurers and clients now ask for golden-thread-quality records on jobs of every size - because clean evidence protects them too. The contractor who can produce it wins the next tender; the one who cannot explains why not. The full legal picture, thresholds and all, is in the guide.
See golden-thread records captured at the point of work, locked to a hash-chained history and visible to your client through the portal - with the whole price list published and no demo to sit through first.
What is golden thread software?
Software that creates and maintains the golden thread of building safety information required by the Building Safety Act 2022: accurate, up-to-date, digitally stored records of a building's design, construction and management, kept available to the people who need them across the building's life. For fire protection work that means structured installation and inspection records - pinned to drawings, photographed, traceable to tested systems, and protected by a history that shows nothing has been quietly changed.
Is golden thread software mandatory?
The Building Safety Act's strict golden thread duty applies to higher-risk buildings - broadly, at least 18 metres or seven storeys with two or more residential units - and for those the information must be created and kept digitally. No specific software is mandated; the duty is about the qualities of the information. In practice, clients and principal contractors increasingly expect golden-thread-quality digital records on jobs of every size.
What makes a record tamper-evident?
A tamper-evident record keeps a history of every change - who made it, when, and what changed - held so that the history itself cannot be silently rewritten. One robust approach is a hash chain: each entry carries a cryptographic fingerprint of the one before it, so removing or altering any past entry breaks the chain visibly. That is what lets a reviewer years later trust that the evidence is what it was on the day it was captured.
Who uses the golden thread after handover?
For an occupied higher-risk building, the Accountable Person - ultimately the Principal Accountable Person - must keep the golden thread up to date as part of the building's safety case, and building owners, managers, fire risk assessors and regulators draw on it. That is why handover matters so much: records that live only in a contractor's system, or a departed employee's laptop, never make it into the thread. Assaya's client portal exists so the people responsible for the building can see the records directly.
Is Assaya "Building Safety Act certified"?
No - and be wary of anyone who claims to be, because no such certification exists. The Building Safety Act is legislation, not a certification scheme; nobody can be "BSA certified". What software can honestly claim is to be built to support the golden thread duties the Act creates - digital, current, available, secure, tamper-evident records. That is the claim Assaya makes, and this page sets out exactly how it meets it.
This page is general information about record-keeping and current UK fire-safety legislation, not legal or compliance advice. Confirm your specific duties with a competent person.