Provev
A hood cleaning technician photographs the inside of a commercial kitchen exhaust hood at night, lit by a headlamp and a portable work light.
Compliance certification for licensed trades

The work is the easy part. Proving it is the job.

Provev turns a service visit into a record that survives being read by a fire marshal, an insurer, and anybody who turns up years later asking what was actually done.

The problem

A job sheet is not evidence

Recurring compliance work — exhaust systems, suppression, extinguishers, backflow, anchors — all ends the same way: somebody signs something, and a PDF gets emailed. It works until the day it has to be relied on. Then the questions are specific. Which edition of the code applied? What exactly was cleaned, and what was skipped? Who was certified to do it, and can you prove the document has not been edited since?

The photos are on a phone

Somewhere in a camera roll, undated against the job, unlabelled, and gone when the phone goes in a sink.

The rules moved

Codes get renumbered and re-adopted on their own schedule. A report that cites a clause without saying which edition is citing whichever one the reader assumes.

Nobody wrote down the gaps

What could not be reached is the part that decides liability after a fire — and it is usually a sentence at the bottom of a page, if it is there at all.

How it works

Three steps, and the third is the product

  1. Capture with no signal

    Kitchens get serviced at 2am, in basements, behind walk-ins. Everything is written to the device first. Photos upload in the background and resume on their own, and the count of what is still pending stays on screen — because a technician has to be able to trust it.

  2. Apply the code that governs the site

    The rules that apply are decided by where the building is, not by which form somebody picked. They are versioned content, resolved for the site and frozen to the job the moment work starts. A change to the code next year does not rewrite what last year's record says.

  3. Issue a record that holds up

    Archival PDF, hashed and independently timestamped, carrying its own structured data inside the file. Delivered by a link that needs no account and no app. Corrections supersede; nothing is ever edited in place.

The artifact

What your customer actually receives

One link. It opens on any phone, with no login and nothing to install — which matters, because the people who most need to read it are the least likely to create an account to do it.

Page one of a Provev compliance record: the masthead, the verification seal with record number and content hash, a table of grease depth readings per hood, and two photographs of an inaccessible duct riser. Open the PDF →
A real record, rendered by the engine that ships. Open it — the text is searchable and data.json is attached inside the file.

Built to still mean something in ten years

Every property below is checked on every build. If one of them breaks, the record does not ship.

Archival PDF/A-3b
The ISO profile for long-term storage — self-contained, fonts embedded, readable without the software that made it.
Data inside the file
The structured inspection travels inside the PDF. The document a person reads carries the data a system reads.
Hashed and timestamped
Each record is hashed, chained to the one before it, and countersigned by an independent timestamp authority.
Accessible by standard
Built to PDF/UA. Every photograph has to be described, or the record does not build.
Gloved hands reach through an opened access panel into a grease-lined exhaust duct, holding a scraper and a work light.
The part nobody records

What you could not reach is part of the record

Every system has a section with no access panel, a run sealed behind a later renovation, a riser you would need to cut drywall to see. Leaving it out of the paperwork does not make it your customer's problem — it makes it yours.

Provev makes it a structured field. Each area gets a reason from a fixed list and a photograph, and it appears on the certificate as prominently as the pass. The customer knows what they still owe. You have a dated record of what you told them.

A restaurant owner in an apron reads a compliance record on her phone at the pass in her own kitchen.
Why it wins you work

The record is the thing they remember

Your customer cannot tell how well the duct was cleaned. They can tell whether what they got afterwards looks like it was produced by a serious company.

Every certificate carries your name, your licence and your technician's certification. It is the one thing from the visit that outlives the visit — and it is what they forward when their insurer asks.

Trades

Built to add trades without rebuilding the platform

The codes, the checklists and the certificates are content, not code — so a new trade is a matter of writing down its rules, not shipping a new product. Kitchen exhaust is where we start because the evidence problem there is the sharpest.

Kitchen exhaust cleaning In build
Kitchen fire suppression Next
Portable extinguishers Planned
Backflow prevention Planned
Early access

We are looking for operators to build this with

Provev is in active development. If you run recurring compliance work and have ever had to prove, after the fact, exactly what was and was not done — we would like to show you what we have and hear where it is wrong.