With a couple quick changes to your record keeping, you can save time, money and frustration, all while documenting your best practices poolside.

Incident and Accident Reports

Why You’re Doing It – You may be prompted to complete these reports by your risk management or insurance company. Most efforts typically stem from a liability reduction standpoint, which is paramount.

Making the Report Stronger – These reports can offer great risk reduction insights. Before you file the report, or ship it off to the corporate office, make a copy and breakdown the details of your latest incident or accident in a spreadsheet. Consider the who, what, where, when and why of each incident. Comparing incidents in aggregate, you’ll note patterns and reoccurrences. Those are areas of increased risk at your facility. Consider rules, facility adjustments or new procedures that can reduce those risks.

Staff Certifications

Why You’re Doing It – If something goes bad poolside, your staff certifications may be audited for compliance.  Keeping them on file for your team is an essential task for all aquatic managers.

Making the Report Stronger – Know when your team members certs are going to expire before they do. With this information you can schedule in-house recertifications and trainings to make sure your team is always up to date. Don’t leave this responsibility up to the individuals.

You’ll also want to document the curriculums used during in-service trainings, as well as sign in sheets for each training. This is a great way to bolster your training documentations – showing you consistently raised the education bar for your team.

Employee Performance

Why You’re Doing It – We’re most likely to be documenting employee performance to fulfill a human resource standard. Unfortunately, sometimes that means we’re more likely to document poor performance and disciplinary actions. These can be helpful when it comes to parting ways with a problematic employee, but these reports can be so much more with extra consideration.

Making the Report Stronger – Start a simple spreadsheet that better tracks employee performance, both good and bad. When it comes time for year-end employee reviews you’ll have much more meaningful information. This makes for better goal setting, detailed and specific performance plans, and improved insights for team training.

Daily Checklists

Why You’re Doing It – These checklist make sure we’re covering the basic day-to-day operations on-deck and in the pump room.

Making the Report Stronger – Consider the adding the following regular checklists to your schedule:

• Opening / Closing Procedures 
• Seasonal Start Up / Shut Down Plans
• Barriers, Fences, Gates and Security System Audits
• Deck, Locker Room, Pump Room and Pool Cleaning Lists
• Pool Equipment Inventory Checks
• Bather Load Counts

Chemical Purchasing and Inventory Control

Why You’re Doing It – It happens to every first-year operator. You run out of an essential chemical over the weekend and scramble to find new supply.  Don’t let this happen to you this summer. Inventory control sheets show minimum and maximum inventory stock values. When a chemical supply dips below that minimum, it’s time to place an order.

Making the Report Stronger – Make life easy on yourself by including essential purchasing information on your inventory control sheets. Include suppliers contact information, chemical names, prices and product reference numbers for quick reorders. Every spring we recommend shopping around and requesting quote from at least three suppliers for all regularly used products.

Utility Reporting

Why You’re Doing It – It’s hard to run a financially solvent pool. Your utility bills can add up quickly if not closely monitored. Know what you’re spending month to month to understand how you can reduce costs. Beyond simple tracking of monthly bills, break this report down further in an excel spreadsheet for simple year to year comparisons and usage vs. spend charts. This detailed information can help point out utility issues, water leaks and efficiency opportunities

Making the Report Stronger – Consider adding individual utility meters, in-line, ahead of specific components of your pool. This will make it easier to evaluate your pool gas, water, or electric usage, separate from your entire buildings utility consumption.

Chemical Reports

Why You’re Doing It – As with many records, your chem reports are likely to be a requirement from your state or local health department. Beyond the obvious compliance component, your records serve as legal representation that you were doing a great job poolside. If your pool chemistry is ever called into question, these reports may be your best proof that you were complying with all required codes and standards.

Making the Report Stronger – Bolster your reports by checking the chemicals more often than required. The states minimum is just the minimum. Why not test more often so you’re never surprised by a chemical value?

You can also support your reports by digitally timestamping them. Consider collecting daily reports and scanning them in once a week to your health department.

Preventative Maintenance Calendars

Why You’re Doing It – Avoid costly repairs and shut-down times by staying ahead of your equipment’s performance-related issues.

Making the Report Stronger – Cataloging and tracking your preventative maintenance starts with a proactive schedule of required PM. Check out our full article on this process and save your future-self from lots of unnecessary aggravation.

We detail all of these processes in our Certified Pool and Spa Operators programs. Many of these checklists can be found in the latest PHTA CPO text book. For more information, or to enroll in any of our classes, click here.