Present, Working, and Not Allowed to Run

Your register can tell you where the forklift is and who signed for it. What it cannot tell you is that the certificate making it legal to lift expired in March — because the one date an asset carries is its warranty, and the machine has been working perfectly the whole time.

Assets & Equipment AWRA OpsHub Team Operations Insights August 6, 2026 11 min read

The inspector asks for the certificate on the overhead crane and somebody goes to look. The crane is exactly where the register says it is. It was serviced in February, the custodian signed for it, and it lifted a load an hour ago without complaint. The certificate is in a folder, it is genuine, and it ran out four months ago. Nothing broke, nobody noticed, and every system you own was working correctly the entire time — because none of them was ever asked to watch that date.

This is the failure that asset systems are worst at, and it is worth naming precisely, because it does not look like a failure until somebody external asks. An asset can be in three states, not two. It can be missing. It can be broken. And it can be present, working, and not lawfully permitted to run.

The third state, and why registers miss it

Custody systems are built around the first state. Where is it, who has it, when is it coming back — the whole apparatus of movement records, custodians and verification exists to answer "is it missing". Maintenance systems are built around the second: last serviced, hours run, what failed. Both are mature disciplines and both are well covered.

The third state has a different shape. It is not about the machine at all. It is about a piece of paper with a date on it, issued by somebody who is not you, which says the machine may be operated. The machine does not change when that date passes. Nothing rattles, nothing warns, output does not drop. The only thing that changes is that you are now operating outside your permission — and you will find out either from an inspector, from an insurer after an incident, or not at all.

Expiry-type date an asset record holds: its warranty. There is no inspection, certificate or calibration date

Record types the document-expiry sweep watches: employees and employment contracts. Neither is a machine

Other places the product does watch an expiry: quotes, vendor documents, employee documents, stock batches. This is an omission, not a philosophy

What the certificate actually is

It helps to be exact about the object, because "compliance documents" is too broad a phrase to design around. The pattern across every regime in this region is the same four parts: a competent person — someone with a defined qualification who is not simply your fitter — examines the equipment at a defined interval, makes a record of the examination, and issues a certificate that stands as permission until its date.

That last part is the one that catches people. The certificate is not evidence that maintenance happened. It is not a service record and it does not replace one. It is a legal permission with a shelf life, and a machine in perfect mechanical condition with a lapsed certificate is, for practical purposes, out of service — while continuing to look exactly like a machine in service.

Equipment class	Broadly what the regime requires	What lapsing actually stops
Lifting machinery — cranes, hoists, forklifts, lifting tackle	Examination by a competent person at intervals, with records kept and a certificate issued	The lift. An incident with lapsed certification is a different conversation with your insurer and with the inspectorate
Pressure equipment — vessels, boilers, compressors	Periodic inspection by an approved inspection authority	Operation, and typically the insurance position along with it. This is the class where "we did not know" travels worst
Electrical installations	A certificate of compliance issued by a registered person, reissued on change and on transfer	Occupancy and transfer more often than day-to-day operation — which is why it is usually discovered at the worst possible moment, during a sale or a lease
Vehicles operated on public roads	Roadworthy testing, with heavier requirements for goods and passenger vehicles	Lawful use of the road, and with it any claim arising from a journey made without it

What makes this a regional post rather than a general one is the density. This is a region of mines, ports, heavy haulage, agriculture at scale and processing plant — an unusually high proportion of the installed asset base sits inside one of those four classes, and a great deal of it is operated by contractors on somebody else's site, where the question of whose certificate applies is answered late and expensively.

A machine that is broken tells you. A machine whose certificate has lapsed keeps working, keeps earning, and keeps quietly widening the gap between what you are doing and what you are permitted to do.

Where this lives in the system, exactly

Being precise about this is more useful than a feature list, because the answer is genuinely mixed and the mixed part is where the risk sits.

The document side is real. The document vault stores a file with a classification, a status and an expiry date, and it links to any record in the system through a polymorphic reference — which means a certificate genuinely can be filed against the asset it belongs to, with its date, rather than living in a folder on somebody's desktop. That is the correct place for it and it works today.

The watching side is where it stops. There is a job that sweeps the vault for documents approaching expiry and emails a reminder — and it filters to documents attached to employees and employment contracts. A certificate attached to a crane is stored, is searchable, has a perfectly good date on it, and is never swept. The capability exists; it was wired for people and not for plant.

The second mechanism you might reach for does not close the gap either, for a reason worth understanding rather than working around. Workflow rules are event-driven — they fire when a record is created or updated and then test a condition. A rule can absolutely test days-until-expiry; that is how the quote-expiry and vendor-document templates work. But nothing updates an asset row on the morning its certificate lapses. Time passing is not an event, so there is nothing for the rule to fire on.

What we do and do not do

Measured against the code, August 2026

What AWRA OpsHub does today

A document can be filed against any record in the system, with a classification, a status and an expiry date, so a certificate can live on the asset it belongs to.
Custom fields are available on assets — including date fields — and they reach the web, the API, mobile, reports, exports, imports and workflows. A "next inspection due" field is a genuine, reportable field, not a note.
The register distinguishes owned, leased and borrowed, so a hired machine is identifiable as somebody else's certificate to hold.
Assets carry a risk level (standard, high, critical) and a per-asset "requires approval" flag, so movement of a flagged machine can be gated on a human decision.
Verification is recorded — who last checked this asset and when — and assets unverified for a long period are surfaced as a portfolio health signal.
Warranty expiry is held per asset and assets with a warranty expiring soon are counted into that same health signal.

What it does not do

There is no inspection date, certificate expiry, calibration due or next-service field on an asset. The only expiry-type date it carries is the warranty.
The document-expiry sweep is scoped to employees and employment contracts. A certificate attached to a machine, with a valid date on it, is stored and never swept. This is the gap that matters most and it is a scoping decision, not a limitation of the vault.
Workflow rules cannot fire on a date arriving, because they are event-driven and nothing updates the asset when time passes.
The warranty figure is a count feeding a score — "eleven assets have warranties expiring" — not an alert naming a machine and a date.
Nothing knows what a competent person is, holds an inspection interval, or can tell you which class of regime an asset falls under.
Marking an asset as under maintenance does not immobilise it — maintenance and damaged are both movable statuses. Only lost and retired are not. There is no "may not be operated" state.

The honest summary: every component needed to solve this exists, and they have not been connected. The vault holds dates. Custom fields on assets reach reports. Expiry is watched in four other places in this product — quotes, vendor documents, employee documents, stock batches — which is exactly why calling this an omission is fair and calling it a design position would not be. Until it is connected, the workaround below is real work that a person has to own, and we would rather say so than let you find out during an inspection.

This is scope, not a ceiling

What is not built for South Africa today can still be built for you

Anything described above as not built is a statement about what ships in the standard product today — not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do in South Africa. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If SARS-shaped return output, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule your own operation needs that the standard one does not have, or a link to a system you already run is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.

SARS output and e-invoicing

VAT201-shaped return output from live records, a maintained rate history rather than a single preset, and e-invoicing against any prescribed interface — with retries, a failure queue and a reconciliation report.

Banks, EFT and card acquirers

Bank statement feeds, EFT and debit-order files, and card acquirer settlement reports pulled into the Payments Register so receipts match invoices without anyone re-keying a statement.

The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are

An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.

Payroll and statutory returns

EMP201 and EMP501 schedules, UIF declarations and COIDA returns produced in the layout your filing body expects, generated from live payroll records instead of rebuilt each month.

Systems you already run

The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.

How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.

Tell us what you need integrated

Closing the gap with what exists

Decide which assets are in scope, and write the list down

Not every asset has a certificate. Lifting machinery, pressure equipment, electrical installations and road vehicles usually do; a laptop does not. Getting this list wrong in the generous direction is the most common failure — a register where four hundred items have an inspection field and eleven of them matter is a register nobody maintains.
Add a "next inspection due" date custom field on assets

This is the single highest-value step and it takes minutes. It is a real field: it reports, it exports, it comes back through the API. Add a second text field for the issuing authority or competent person while you are there, because the renewal conversation always starts with "who did it last time".
File the certificate itself against the asset, with its expiry date

The vault takes it, links it to the machine and holds the date. Nothing will remind you — that is the next step — but when somebody asks for the certificate on that crane, the answer is a search rather than an excavation.
Put a saved report on the calendar, because nothing will page you

A report over the custom field, sorted by date, read on a fixed day each month by a named person. This is the compensating control for the missing sweep and it should be written down as such, with the name in it. "Somebody will notice" is what you are replacing.
Use the risk level and the approval flag on certificated machines

Mark them high or critical and require approval to move them. This does not check the certificate — nothing does — but it puts a human decision in the path of the machine leaving site, which is the moment the question "is its paperwork current" is most likely to actually be asked.
Record whose certificate it is for anything hired or borrowed

Set the ownership type honestly. A hired machine's certificate is the hire company's to hold and your exposure to operate under, and the two facts get separated exactly when the machine has been on your site for eight months and feels like yours.