DPAS Inspection App
An offline-first inspection app that captures an electrical due-diligence audit on a phone in a basement plant room, and writes the finished Word report and capital plan on the way out.
The Client
DPAS carry out electrical due-diligence audits across property portfolios — a consultant walks a site, works through every switchboard, distribution board, comms room and common area, records what is compliant and what is not, and produces a report the asset owner can budget from.
The work was running on paper and a phone camera, then being retyped into a Word template back at the office. The retyping was where the day went, and where the inconsistencies came from: two inspectors describing the same defect two different ways, photographs separated from the rows they belonged to, and cost tables assembled by hand at the end.
The Brief
Replace the notebook, not the inspector. Whatever was built had to be faster than writing on a page while standing on a ladder, or it would be abandoned in the first week.
Work with no signal. Switch rooms, basements and plant rooms are where the reception is worst, and that is exactly where the capture happens — so the app had to be fully usable offline and reconcile itself later.
Produce the deliverable, not the data. The output had to be the finished, formatted Word report and the capital-expenditure cost plan, referenced against the relevant Australian standards — not a CSV export somebody still has to write up.
What We Built.
A structured site hierarchy
Projects break down into regions, areas, sites and buildings, so a portfolio audit is organised the way the portfolio actually is. Every inspection is scoped to a building, and site-level infrastructure is captured once rather than repeated in every building chapter.
One-line-per-row capture flow
Every compliance row starts in the compliant state, so an inspector only touches a row that has something wrong with it. Flagging one opens a defect sheet of pre-authored defects, each paired one-for-one with a concrete recommendation and referenced to AS/NZS 3000, AS/NZS 61439, AS/NZS 2293, AS/NZS 3760 and the NSW Service & Installation Rules.
Offline-first by design
The app is an installable progressive web app backed by a local database on the device. Inspections, answers, defect ticks and photographs are written locally first and synchronised when a connection returns, so a lost signal mid-audit costs nothing.
Photographs compressed on the device
Site photography is captured against the specific row it evidences and compressed in the browser before it ever leaves the phone — which is what makes a hundred-photo inspection sync over a weak connection instead of stalling on it.
AI-drafted custom defects
No catalogue covers everything. An inspector can type what they are looking at in plain language and have the app draft the defect wording, the recommendation, the severity, the cost bucket and an indicative price — which then flows into the report identically to a pre-authored entry.
Word report generation
The finished inspection assembles itself into the practice's own branded Word template: narrative condition and recommendation cells written as professional prose, asset counts stated in sentences, and chapters for equipment that was not present dropped entirely rather than left as empty tables.
Capital plan costing
Defects carry per-unit rates and counts, so the report ends in a capital-expenditure table the asset owner can budget from — with the problem and the action stated in under ten words a line, because a cost table nobody can scan is a cost table nobody uses.
Built With
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Progressive Web App
- IndexedDB offline storage
- Firebase
- Cloud Firestore
- OpenAI
- DOCX generation
- Tailwind CSS
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