Multi-site facilities management compliance: what applies, and how to prove it

Short version: facilities compliance is a set of separate obligations — work health and safety, fire safety, electrical safety, asbestos, building services and the people who work on site — and most of them are set state by state, then vary again by building class and age. Running it across many sites comes down to one register of what applies where, a named owner and a due date for each item, evidence for every completed task, and the right tool for each kind of obligation.

What facilities compliance actually covers

Work health and safety

Every jurisdiction except Victoria has adopted the national model WHS laws — Western Australia most recently, from 31 March 2022. Victoria regulates workplace safety under its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004. Under the model laws, a business or undertaking must manage risks to the people working at and visiting its sites so far as is reasonably practicable. Two principles matter most across a portfolio: a duty cannot be transferred to someone else, and more than one party can hold the same duty at once. A facilities manager, a building owner and a cleaning or security contractor can all owe duties on the same site, and each must consult, cooperate and coordinate with the others so far as is reasonably practicable.

Fire safety and essential safety measures

Fire safety maintenance is set by state building and fire laws, not by one national rule. Two examples show how different they are:

• New South Wales. Building owners must keep essential fire safety measures maintained, and from 13 February 2026 those measures in class 1b and class 2 to 9 buildings must be inspected and tested in accordance with AS 1851-2012. Owners also lodge an annual fire safety statement with the council and Fire and Rescue NSW.
• Victoria. Under Part 15 of the Building Regulations 2018, the owner must keep essential safety measures maintained, prepare an annual essential safety measures report, and keep maintenance records available for the municipal building surveyor or the fire brigade to inspect.

Other states and territories run their own schemes. A portfolio spanning several states has several fire-safety regimes, not one.

Electrical safety

Under the model WHS Regulations, plug-in electrical equipment used where its normal use is likely to damage it — exposure to moisture, heat, vibration, mechanical damage, corrosive chemicals or dust — must be regularly inspected and tested by a competent person. AS/NZS 3760 is the standard most commonly used to do that, with indicative testing intervals for different environments. Victoria sits outside the model laws and applies its own.

Asbestos

This is the obligation most often stated wrongly. Under the model WHS laws, if you manage or control a workplace building, structure or plant that was built or installed before 2004 — or before 1990 in Queensland — you must make sure an asbestos register is prepared and kept at the workplace. Asbestos must be identified by a competent person or assumed to be present, the register must be reviewed regularly, kept accessible to workers and other businesses who need it, and handed on to whoever takes over management of the workplace. Where asbestos is present, an asbestos management plan is also required, reviewed at least every five years and whenever circumstances change — for example when asbestos is removed or disturbed. A workplace built after 31 December 2003 (after 31 December 1989 in Queensland), with no asbestos identified or likely to be present, does not need a register.

Victoria sets its own asbestos duties under Part 4.4 of the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017: a person who manages or controls a workplace, or an employer, must keep an up-to-date asbestos register and review it every five years. Safe Work Australia is also reviewing the model asbestos framework, so check for changes before relying on any summary — including this one.

Building services and assets

Lifts, air handling, plumbing, backup power and the building fabric all need planned maintenance and records. The requirements come from a mix of state building and fire laws, each building’s own approvals and the Australian Standards those reference, and they differ by building class and state. This is the territory of maintenance contractors and maintenance software, and it is where most of a facility’s compliance calendar sits.

The people who work on site

Every cleaner, guard, technician and trades contractor who attends a site is part of the compliance picture: inducted for that site, holding the licences their work requires, holding any check the role needs — a working with children check for some school work, for example — and with a record of when they were there. It is the part most often run on spreadsheets and goodwill, and it is the part this guide comes back to at the end.

Why multiple sites make it harder

Each obligation above is manageable for one building. Spread them across a portfolio and three problems appear.

• Fragmentation. Each site grows its own way of tracking things — a folder here, a spreadsheet there, a contractor’s emailed certificate somewhere else — so nobody can see the status of the whole portfolio.
• Variation. A building put up in 1985 carries an asbestos-register duty that a 2010 fit-out does not. A site in New South Wales follows a different fire-safety regime from one in Victoria. What is due, and when, differs at every address.
• Evidence. Compliance is only as good as your ability to show it. When an audit, an inspection or an incident arrives, the question is whether you can produce the service record, the induction, the licence and the attendance record — not whether you believe they exist.

A framework that works across a portfolio

1. Keep one register of obligations per site. For each site record the state, building class, year built, fire safety measures, asbestos status, electrical testing schedule, maintenance plan and what contractors attending it must hold. Without this, nothing else can be tracked.
2. Give every obligation a due date and an owner. An item with no next-due date and no named person accountable for it is the item that gets missed.
3. Capture evidence when the work is done. A service is not finished until the record shows the date, the result, the standard it was done to and any defects raised.
4. See the whole portfolio at once. Site managers need their own list; whoever owns compliance for the group needs every site on one screen — what is current, what is due and what is overdue.
5. Close the loop on defects. A fault found at inspection has to be tracked to completion. A defect that is recorded and never fixed is worse than one never found, because now there is a record that you knew.

The tooling landscape, honestly

No single product covers every obligation above, and most portfolios use more than one kind of tool.

• Maintenance management systems (CMMS) handle assets, planned maintenance, work orders and service records — where fire, electrical, air-handling and building maintenance is usually scheduled and evidenced.
• Safety, risk and compliance platforms (EHS and GRC) handle risk registers, safety management systems, audits and corrective actions, often aligned to standards such as ISO 45001.
• Workforce and contractor tools handle the people side: who is inducted and credentialed for which site, who was allocated and when they turned up.

These solve different problems. A maintenance system will not tell you whether tonight’s security guard holds a current licence, and a workforce tool will not schedule your fire servicing.

Where OnCrew fits, and where it does not

OnCrew is not a maintenance system, a safety management system or a risk and compliance platform. It does not manage building assets, schedule maintenance, run fire or electrical inspections, hold asbestos registers or risk registers, or provide ISO certification. For those obligations you need the tools above.

What OnCrew covers is the workforce layer — the cleaning, security, maintenance and trades crews you send to sites:

• Onboarding with an office review. Workers onboard from their phone and upload their tickets, licences and inductions. Uploads wait for your office to review, and a worker is placed only after your office marks them ready to work.
• Credentials with expiry tracking. Each licence, ticket, induction and check is recorded with its document number, issue date and expiry date. Expiry dates are rechecked automatically, and where SMS reminders are switched on the worker is texted 14, 7 and 1 day before a lapse.
• Requirements per site, set to warn or enforce. Each site carries its own list of required credentials, and each requirement is set to warn or to enforce. Only a credential your office has reviewed and that is in date counts. Where a requirement enforces, a worker without it is blocked from that site’s shifts unless an admin deliberately overrides the block, and the override is logged. Where it warns, the allocation goes ahead and the coordinator sees what is missing. More on the compliance engine.
• Location-checked clock-in. Each clock-in is GPS-stamped and checked against the site’s geofence; one from outside the boundary is recorded and flagged for review rather than blocked. Clock-out is time-stamped but not location-checked. That gives you a record of when each worker clocked in at each site, which is useful evidence against a service agreement.
• Incident records. Supervisors and the office can record incidents against a site — including near misses, hazards and dangerous incidents — with the mechanism, PPE, treatment and severity, plus files.
• An audit trail of key actions. Worker allocations, compliance overrides, changes to workers’ credentials and to site requirements, timesheet approvals and incident reports are logged with who and when.

Put simply, OnCrew helps answer “were the right people on our sites, and can we show it?” It does not answer “is the fire system serviced?” or “is the asbestos register current?” If your sites need cleaners who hold a working with children check, see WWCC tracking for cleaning and hospitality staff.

A per-site checklist

A prompt to adapt to your portfolio, states and building classes — not a substitute for advice on your own sites.

• Are WHS hazards identified for the site, with controls documented and current — and are the duties of each contractor on site agreed?
• Is fire safety maintenance done and recorded to that state’s requirements (for example AS 1851-2012 in New South Wales), with any annual statement or report completed?
• Is plug-in equipment used in harsh conditions inspected and tested by a competent person, with records?
• If the building was built before 2004 (before 1990 in Queensland), is there an asbestos register at the workplace — and a management plan where asbestos is present? In Victoria, are the OHS Regulations’ asbestos duties met?
• Are lifts, air handling, plumbing and backup power on a maintenance schedule with records?
• Does every obligation have a next-due date and a named owner?
• Is evidence captured for each completed task, with defects tracked to closure?
• Is every worker and contractor attending the site inducted, credentialed for what the site requires, and their attendance recorded?
• Can you see the status of every site in one place, not site by site?

Official sources checked for this guide (October 2026): Safe Work Australia — model WHS laws · Safe Work Australia — principles of WHS duties · Safe Work Australia — asbestos registers · Safe Work Australia — managing asbestos risks · WorkSafe Victoria — asbestos in workplaces · Safe Work Australia — electrical safety duties · NSW Government — AS 1851-2012 requirements · Building and Plumbing Commission (Vic) — essential safety measures