Record lifecycles and status

A number of SHEQ Control Plane registers — Safe Work Procedures, Permits to Work, Non-Conformance Reports, Concessions, and Inspection & Test Plans among them — give each record an explicit status field that moves it through a defined sequence, rather than treating every record as simply "saved" or "not saved."

Most SHEQ processes have a real-world equivalent to a status: a procedure is being drafted, then reviewed, then approved for use; a permit is requested, then issued, then closed once work finishes. Recording that status explicitly, as a field on the record itself, means the register can be filtered by it, and anyone looking at a record later can tell what stage it was actually at — which matters when an incident investigation or an audit needs to reconstruct what was true at a particular point in time, not just what the record looks like today.

Each register defines its own status values and its own meaning for them — there's no single shared "status" concept enforced across every module, because different processes genuinely have different stages (compare Safe Work Procedures' draft → review → approved → superseded to Permits to Work's requested → issued → closed). Moving a record between statuses is done the same way as editing any other field, gated by that register's ordinary write permission (e.g. safe_work_procedures:write) — there's no separate, more restrictive "approve" permission or workflow engine layered on top. A Viewer can't do it (no write access at all); anyone with write access to the register can, whether the edit is to the title or to the status field. See Settings for how roles and permissions actually work today.

When reading a module's own documentation, its Fields section lists the exact status values it uses and what each one means for that specific register.