A valuation is challenged long after the person who prepared it has moved on. The question is never what the number was. It is how it was arrived at, and by whom.
An audit trail you have to remember to write is not an audit trail. QScope records the change as it happens, including changes made by other surveyors in your practice.
Nothing in the interface can alter or delete an entry. That is the whole point: a record that can be quietly amended is worthless as evidence.
A shared practice login makes every entry say the same name, which is the same as recording nothing. It is also the fastest way to make an audit trail useless in front of an adjudicator.
QScope prices per surveyor rather than per project partly so that giving everyone their own login never costs you a project.
An audit trail proves who changed a figure. The project record is the thing being changed: the drawings, photographs and contracts the valuation rests on.
Held on the same project, every file carries its own trail entry, so a superseded drawing can be shown as the version that was current on the day the work was valued.
Most audit entries are about money. A certificate moving from draft to issued, a variation approved, a retention rate changed: each one moves a figure the client will eventually see.
The valuation is where those figures are set, and every change to it lands in the trail with the old value and the new.
A variation is challenged more often than anything else in a final account. What is asked for is not the amount but who instructed it, under which clause, and when it was approved.
QScope records each variation as it is raised, approved, rejected or removed, so the history of the change survives the people who made it.
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing in QScope can amend or remove an audit entry. A record that the holder can edit proves nothing, which defeats the reason for keeping one.
Yes. Contract sum, retention rate, contract form and key dates are recorded with the old and the new value, because a quietly changed retention rate moves every certificate after it.
Yes, to CSV, per project. It opens in Excel with a byte order mark so names with accents are not mangled, which matters when the file goes into a bundle.
RICS does not mandate a particular system, but the Black Book expects a quantity surveyor to be able to show how a valuation was reached. An automatic record is the cheapest way to be able to answer that a year later.
Not your whole portfolio. One live job, one certificate. If it does not save you time the first time you use it, walk away and take your data with you.