When an Environmental Health Officer visits, the natural instinct is to hand over your phone or tablet and let them look through it themselves. Rated5 has a screen built for exactly that — but it deliberately can’t do everything the rest of the app can.
What inspection mode is
Inspection mode is a separate view of your account: your history, your adopted safe methods, your documents, your probe calibration record, and — if you’ve switched it on — your HACCP plan. You choose a range (last 28 days, last 3 months, last 12 months, or a custom range) and everything in it is laid out for browsing, in the same structure an officer already expects.
Why it’s read-only
The obvious objection to handing someone your phone is: what if they tap the wrong thing? Inspection mode removes that question entirely — there’s no edit control anywhere in it, on anything. Whoever’s holding the device, whether that’s you or the officer, can look through months of records without any risk of a check getting accidentally answered, a reading getting logged twice, or an existing entry being touched.
Why that builds trust, not just convenience
A record that can’t be changed while someone’s reviewing it is a more credible record than one that theoretically could be — it removes any question about whether what they’re looking at has been tidied up in the moment. It’s the same principle behind the fact that nothing in your diary is ever edited or backdated after the fact: the record you show is provably the record that was kept.
One more deliberate choice
Inspection mode doesn’t show the usual help prompts either — no “?” buttons, no guidance overlays. It’s a plain, focused view of your records, with nothing else competing for attention on the screen while someone’s reviewing it.
The point of it
Inspection mode isn’t a special “cleaned up” version of your data — it’s the same data, in the same read-only shape, whenever you need to show it. That’s the whole idea: nothing to prepare, nothing to tidy, nothing that can go wrong by tapping the wrong thing.