Templates
What a building inspection report template needs, NZ edition
An NZ pre-purchase report template needs five parts: property details, a stated scope to NZS 4306, area-by-area findings with photos, a summary, and terms. Here is what each is for.
A building inspection report template for New Zealand needs five parts: property and inspection details, a stated scope and limitations aligned to NZS 4306, findings organised area by area with photographs, a summary of significant findings, and the terms the report is issued under. Everything else is layout. We make ducksoup, which turns inspection templates into reports, so templates are literally our business; what follows is what we have learned matters in one, and it applies whether yours lives in Word, in a PDF, or in software.
What sections does the template need?
| Section | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Property and inspection details | Address, client, date, weather, who inspected, what was accessible |
| Scope and limitations | What a visual, non-invasive inspection does and does not cover, stated before the findings |
| Findings, area by area | The inspection itself, in the order the property was walked |
| Summary | The significant findings in one place, for the reader who stops there |
| Terms | Who may rely on the report and on what basis |
Two of these carry more legal weight than they look. The scope section is what tells a reader that not seeing under the floor coverings is a limitation of every visual inspection rather than a failure of yours. And the terms need to live inside the report body itself: New Zealand law firms advising inspectors recommend disclaimers sit in the body of the report so they cannot be detached when the report is passed to someone it was not written for.
What does NZS 4306 mean for the template?
NZS 4306 is the New Zealand standard for residential property inspection. It defines the inspection as a visual, non-invasive assessment and sets out what a compliant report covers, which is why "reports to NZS 4306" is one of the first questions buyers are told to ask an inspector. For the template, that means the areas you report on and the scope language you state should follow the standard's shape rather than a structure imported from overseas software, because the people reading NZ reports, including lawyers acting for buyers, expect that framing. The standard itself is copyrighted, so buy it from Standards NZ and build your template against your copy rather than against someone's summary of it.
What makes a finding worth reading?
The template's real job is forcing every finding to answer four things: what was observed, where it is, why it matters, and what to do about it, with a photograph attached. "Some deterioration noted to exterior" fills a page; "cracked mortar to the chimney on the south elevation, allowing water entry, repoint within 12 months" is a finding someone can act on. A template with a structured finding format produces the second kind by default, and that structure is the single biggest quality difference between reports we see. There is a longer treatment of this in what a good report looks like when it arrives, and the on-site side of it in our area-by-area inspection checklist.
Should the template live in Word or in software?
A Word or PDF template is free, familiar, and completely portable. Its cost is assembly: every report means moving photos off a phone, resizing them into tables, and re-typing the standard comments your business has written a hundred times before. Software's promise is doing that assembly for you; its usual price is abandoning your template and re-typing your structure and wording into whatever shape the software ships with.
That trade is the one ducksoup was built to remove: it imports the template you already have, from the document it currently lives in, and your areas, items and standard wording become what you capture against on site. The years you have spent refining your template are the asset. Whatever tool you choose, pick one that treats it that way.