Permit to work software, and the jobs the law will not let you start without one

The short answer

A permit to work is a formal, recorded authorisation: a named person with the authority to do so confirms that a particular hazardous job may begin, in a named place, for a stated period, with named precautions in place. The person doing the work signs to say they understand it. When the job is finished, someone signs it off and the plant goes back into service. That signing chain is the permit. A form that collects the same information without it is a checklist.

Teammate has no permit module and no screen labelled permit to work. What it has is a form builder, and a permit built as a form inherits everything the rest of the system does: it can be filled in offline at the work face, carry a table of named signatures, raise tasks with owners and due dates from inside the record, be sent to a contractor who has no login, and be found, exported and emailed from the Form Records register afterwards.

There is one thing it does not do, and it is worth knowing before you read any further: Teammate does not enforce a permit's validity window. It will hold the valid-from and valid-to as fields and remind people about them. It will not invalidate the record when the time runs out. The honest limit section sets out exactly where the product stops and a person starts.

What a permit actually is

The clearest definition belongs to the UK's Health and Safety Executive, in its guidance on permit-to-work systems: a permit is “a formal recorded process used to control work which is identified as potentially hazardous”, and “a means of communication between site/installation management, plant supervisors and operators and those who carry out the hazardous work”. Elsewhere in the same guidance it describes the document as one that “authorises certain people to carry out specific work at a specific site at a certain time”.

Three things in that definition do the work, and all three have to be present or you do not have a permit system:

• A named authority — a specific person with the power to issue, and limits on that power. In Singapore's confined space regulations this is the authorised manager, appointed before anyone enters. The HSE says a permit system must clearly identify who may authorise which jobs and the limits of their authority.
• A specific job, place and period — not a standing authorisation. Australia's regulation 67 requires the permit to name the confined space, the persons permitted to enter, and the period of time during which the work will be carried out.
• Issue, acceptance and close-out — three separate signatures, not one. Issue confirms the isolations and precautions are actually in place. Acceptance confirms the person doing the work understands the hazards. Close-out confirms the work is finished, everyone is out, and the plant can go back.

Where it is the law

There is no country we looked at where “you must have a permit to work system” is a general legal duty. What exists instead is a permit requirement for specific work, in specific regulations — and the detail differs enough between markets that a single global template will be wrong somewhere. Every statement below was read from the regulation or the regulator, not from a summary.

Singapore — statutory, and the most prescriptive

Singapore is the one market where permits are squarely written into law, and where the three-role structure is spelled out. Regulation 10 of the Workplace Safety and Health (Confined Spaces) Regulations 2009 prohibits anyone from entering or working in a confined space unless the occupier has evaluated that entry is necessary and a confined space entry permit has been issued. The permit has to specify the description and location of the space, the purpose of entry, the results of the gas testing, and its period of validity.

Three people are involved, and the regulation names them. The responsible person appoints an authorised manager and a confined space safety assessor before anyone enters. The supervisor of the person entering makes the application, addressed to the manager and submitted to the assessor. The assessor tests the atmosphere. The manager issues the permit, and may only do so once satisfied that oxygen is between 19.5% and 23.5% by volume and flammable gas or vapour is below 10% of its lower explosive limit. The manager must review the need for entry daily and may revoke the permit. A copy is posted at the entrance. If a hazardous atmosphere is detected, everyone leaves and nobody re-enters until a new permit is issued.

Two things people get wrong about Singapore. The regulation sets no fixed validity period — it is whatever is written on the permit, and a fresh application is required if the work overruns. And the two-year retention everyone quotes attaches to the atmosphere test records, not to the permit; the regulation tells the authorised manager to retain a copy of the permit but sets no duration for it.

Singapore also requires a permit-to-work for hazardous work at height — work in or on an elevated workplace from which a person could fall more than three metres — in a factory, under the Work at Heights Regulations 2013, using the same authorised-manager and safety-assessor structure. And in shipyards and on ships in harbour, no hot work may be carried out without a hot-work permit issued by the ship repair manager. Breaches of the main confined space duties carry fines up to S$50,000 or up to two years' imprisonment.

Australia — confined spaces, and nothing else

Under the harmonised Work Health and Safety Regulations, the confined space entry permit in regulation 67 is the only work-specific permit in the Regulations. It must be completed by a competent person, be in writing, and specify the space, the names of the persons permitted to enter, the period of time during which the work will be carried out, and the control measures — which must be based on the risk assessment required by regulation 66. It must also contain space to acknowledge that the work is complete and that everyone has left.

Retention is in regulation 77, and the two documents are treated differently: the risk assessment for at least 28 days after the work is completed, the permit at least until the work is completed — and if a notifiable incident occurs in connection with the work, both for at least two years after the incident.

There is no hot-work permit and no electrical-work permit in those Regulations. Searching the whole compilation for “hot work” returns nothing. Permit systems appear only as examples of controls: as a way of providing a safe system of work for falls, and as the last-resort access control for remotely energised plant after isolation, interlocked guards and presence-sensing devices have been considered. If your Australian hot-work permit exists because of company policy or a client's contract rather than the Regulations, that is normal — but worth knowing which it is.

New Zealand — not in the regulations

The Health and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016 do not mention a permit to work, and do not mention confined spaces either. What they require is risk management: regulation 22 for atmospheres with potential for fire or explosion, regulation 23 for ignition sources in them.

The permit comes through guidance instead. WorkSafe New Zealand accepts AS 2865 — the Australian confined spaces standard — as the current state of knowledge on confined space entry work, and its quick guide says the PCBU or person responsible for the work “should issue a written authority – or confined space entry permit – as described in the Standard”, describing it as a safety checklist to make sure nothing is overlooked. That is a “should”, in guidance, resting on a standard — which in practice is what a regulator expects to see, but it is not the same as a named statutory permit.

United Kingdom — a safe system of work, by any means

Regulation 4 of the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997 requires that no person at work enter or work in a confined space except in accordance with a system of work which renders that work safe. It does not say “permit”. The HSE's own leaflet then asks whether a permit-to-work is necessary and describes it as the formal check that all the elements of a safe system of work are in place before anyone enters. So in the UK a permit is a recognised means of discharging the duty rather than the duty itself.

The HSE is also clear that more permits is not better: they “should not be applied to all activities, as experience has shown that their overall effectiveness may be weakened”, and are “not normally required for controlling general visitors to site or routine maintenance tasks in non-hazardous areas”. A system that demands a permit for changing a light bulb trains people to sign without reading.

Malaysia — a code of practice, with hard limits

Malaysia's position sits in the Department of Occupational Safety and Health's Industry Code of Practice for Safe Working in a Confined Space 2010, presented as a source of reference for meeting the general duties under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994. Where it is stricter than anywhere else is duration: the permit must state its duration, which may not exceed the time needed for the task or eight hours, whichever is shorter, and may be extended once by the entry supervisor for a maximum of four hours provided nothing has changed. The permit issuer must be a trained entry supervisor and an authorised gas tester, and must not be the person supervising the work. Cancelled and closed permits are kept at least a year, or until the next entry, whichever comes later.

A permit is not a SWMS

This is the most common confusion we hear, and in Australia it has a cost: people assume the SWMS they already produce covers the permit obligation. It does not, and the two documents answer different questions.

A confined space entry on a construction site typically needs all three: it is high risk construction work under the SWMS list, so it needs a SWMS; it is a confined space entry, so it needs a regulation 67 permit; and both depend on the risk assessment. Singapore's own tripartite guidance makes the same point from the other direction, listing safe method statements among the other precautions to be taken in addition to a permit, not instead of one.

If you are in Australia and want the SWMS side, our SWMS guide covers the high risk construction work list and what a SWMS has to contain.

What a permit contains

The HSE's guidance sets out the essential elements of a permit form, and the statutory requirements in Singapore, Australia and Malaysia add the confined-space specifics. Put together, a competent permit carries eleven things:

• Permit title and a unique reference — including cross-references to any other permits or isolation certificates for the same job.
• Job location and plant identification — which space, which vessel, which line.
• Description of the work and its limits — what is authorised, and by implication what is not.
• Hazard identification — including residual hazards and hazards introduced by the work itself.
• Precautions, isolations and emergency arrangements — signed by the people who actually carried them out, not by the person who asked for them.
• Protective equipment required.
• Issue — the issuing authority's signature, the date and time, and the duration of validity. High-hazard work often takes a second authoriser.
• Acceptance — the signature of the person doing the work, confirming they understand the work, the hazards and the precautions.
• Extension or shift handover — with a new expiry, and a re-validation if the person in direct control changes, work stops and restarts, or the job changes in a way the current permit does not cover.
• Hand-back — signed by the person doing the work to say it is complete and everyone is out, then by the issuer to say the plant is ready.
• Cancellation and close-out — certifying the work was tested and the plant satisfactorily recommissioned.

For a confined space, add the atmospheric test results and who took them, the names of the authorised entrants, and the stand-by and rescue arrangements. Those three are statutory requirements in Singapore and Australia, not nice-to-haves.

Which jobs need one

The HSE's list of work where a permit or certificate should be considered is the most useful starting point, because it is about the nature of the hazard rather than one jurisdiction:

• Hot work — welding, flame cutting, grinding, and any work that uses or generates heat or produces sparks.
• Confined space entry — tanks, vessels, pits, silos. The one activity that is permit-controlled by law in more than one of our markets.
• Breaking containment — cutting into pipework carrying hazardous substances, or opening a pressure system.
• Electrical isolation and work on dangerous equipment — high-voltage work in particular, usually paired with an isolation certificate.
• Work at height — and in Singapore, a statutory permit above three metres in a factory.
• Excavation and ground disturbance — the HSE names an excavation certificate; in Australia a trench deeper than 1.5 metres triggers a SWMS rather than a permit.
• Work on live or remotely energised plant, pressure testing, diving, and work with hazardous substances.

And the other half of the answer, which matters just as much: routine maintenance in a non-hazardous area, and general visitors to site, are not permit work. Singapore's tripartite guidance says permits are “generally applied to non-routine work activities”. A permit system that covers everything is a permit system nobody reads.

Electronic permits

If you work on Singapore public sector construction, this is probably why you are reading. A Ministry of Manpower circular requires the main contractor on public sector construction and construction-related projects of three million dollars or more, for tenders called on or after 1 April 2024, to adopt an electronic permit-to-work system. It is a tender and contract requirement for those projects — not a general duty on every Singapore employer, and not a reason for anyone else to replace a paper system that works.

What the specification asks for is worth reading even if it does not apply to you, because it is a decent definition of a competent electronic permit system:

• Only authorised people can assess and approve a permit, with safeguards against falsification.
• An audit trail, for investigation purposes.
• Unique permit IDs, and a workflow that cannot be skipped.
• Expiry alerts, and full visibility of ongoing high-risk activities including conflicting works.
• Records kept a minimum of five years from the permit creation date.

How Teammate handles it

You build the permit yourself, as a form template, and then it works the way everything else in Teammate works. There is no permit module to configure and nothing to wait for. In practice that means:

• Your own permit, field by field — text, number, date, time, dropdown, checkbox, selection list, rating, table, sub-form for repeating groups, acknowledgement, file upload, and a Location field that captures the GPS position where it was filled in. Integration fields can pull in an employee, an asset, a hazardous substance, an external party, or link a risk straight from the risk register.
• Start from the paper permit you already use — upload the existing PDF, Word file, or photographs of the paper form, and Teammate drafts the template from it. For permits specifically this is usually the fastest route in, because the form you want already exists on a clipboard.
• Several named signatures on one record — switch on multi-signature and the signature field becomes a table of signers, one row per person with their name, their own signature, and up to five extra columns you define — so Role can read Issuer, Receiver, Authorising manager. Up to fifty signers, all on one record rather than a pile of copies, and the table prints on the PDF.
• Signed and filled in at the work face, offline — Teammate detects the missing connection and switches to offline mode by itself. The permit saves locally and shows as Queued, photos stay on the device, and everything syncs when the device reconnects. The signature pad works with a finger. One caveat worth planning for: the template has to have loaded once while online before it can be used offline.
• A sign-off step before it counts — a form can require sign-off before it is treated as complete, and an admin can reopen a closed record if something needs changing.
• Actions raised from inside the permit — a task with a title, an assignee and a due date, created from the record and linked back to it. The gas test that failed, the isolation that was missing, the guard that needs replacing before the next shift.
• A QR code at every place it is used — a form can have as many QR codes as you need, one per location: a site gate, a vehicle, a specific vessel. Each code carries its own workplace, branch and coordinators, and counts its scans.
• Contractors without a login — send the permit to an external party by email and they complete it through a link with no account. A person set as reviewer gets a link to check the submission and sign it off. The external register tracks what is outstanding, in progress or complete, sends reminders singly or in bulk, and exports as a ZIP. You can mark particular document types as prerequisites that have to be in place before work begins.
• Reminders against the dates on the permit — a reminder carries a due date, an optional repeat, an advance notification before it falls due, and can link the form that has to be completed for it. Submitting the linked form closes that cycle and schedules the next.
• Finding them again — the Form Records register narrows by form type, date range, status, who submitted, or any custom field the permit captures, and a combination of filters saves as a view. Select records in bulk to export or share them, or generate a PDF of a single permit and email it.
• Who can see it — each template is limited to a user group, and permission groups can restrict people to particular workplaces or branches.

The forms engine behind all of this is described on the online forms page, and if you want to see it against your own permit, bring it to a demo — it is a better conversation than a feature list.

The honest limit

A permit is, by its nature, an authorisation that is valid for a window and granted in a particular order. Those are the two things Teammate does not enforce, and we would rather you heard it here than found it in week three.

• No automatic expiry. A permit form can hold valid-from and valid-to as date and time fields, and a reminder can notify people before that time passes. Nothing invalidates the record when it does. Closing a permit is a person's action, not the clock's.
• No sequential approval chain. A form can require a sign-off, and the multi-signature table can hold an issuer, a receiver and an authorising manager as separate named rows. What it does not do is force those three to sign in order, each from their own login, before the permit counts as issued. If your permit regime depends on that order being enforced by the system, test it before you commit.
• Returning a submission is built into audits and online training, where a reviewer can send it back with a note. For an ordinary form, the route is an admin reopening and editing the record instead.
• Site sign-in does not check permits. Teammate does visitor and contractor sign-in by QR code and kiosk, with policies and questionnaires at the gate — but nothing links a sign-in to an open permit, so it will not stop someone walking onto a job that has not been authorised.

What is left when you take those away is still, for most organisations, the whole problem: a permit that is legible, filled in where the work is, signed by the right people, found again in seconds, and produced as a PDF when a regulator or a client asks. If what you need instead is an interlocked workflow that refuses to let a job start, say so early in the conversation and we will tell you straight whether we are the right fit.

What to look for

Whether or not you end up with us, these are the questions worth asking any permit-to-work product. They come from the regulations above rather than from a feature comparison:

• Does it work with no signal? Confined spaces are in basements, tanks and tunnels. A permit system that needs a connection at the point of entry will be filled in afterwards, at a desk, which is the failure the permit exists to prevent.
• Can it hold three different signatures for issue, acceptance and close-out, attributable to named people?
• Is the form yours to change? Permit content is set by your jurisdiction and your plant. If a gas-test row or a rescue-arrangements section needs a vendor ticket, the system will not keep up with your regulator.
• What happens at expiry? Ask explicitly whether the permit becomes invalid by itself, or whether a person has to close it. Both answers are defensible; only one of them matches what most buyers assume.
• Can a contractor use it without a licence? The people doing permit work are very often not your employees.
• Can you get the records out? Australia wants the risk assessment for 28 days and both documents for two years after a notifiable incident; Singapore's e-PTW specification wants five years. Export and retention are a compliance feature, not an afterthought — getting your data out covers what to ask for.
• Can you report by site? A permit register you cannot filter by workplace is no use to a safety manager covering nine of them.

Questions we get asked