Quality & Safety
Where it lives
Project

Safety Data Sheets

Every hazardous substance brought onto a site needs its Safety Data Sheet available to the people working near it. The register is that requirement made practical: one project-wide list of what is on site, what it does to you, and where the current sheet is.

The pressure on this tool is not recording sheets, it is keeping the register honest. A sheet superseded by the manufacturer, a substance nobody has used since the fit-out, a subcontractor who brought something on without telling anybody: each of those is a register that is technically complete and actually wrong.

Adding a sheet

Choose New and upload the SDS PDF. Teralo reads it and fills the form in for you, so the work is checking rather than typing. Reading a sheet uses AI credits, so see AI credits for how that is metered.

Then say which organisations actually use the substance on site. A sheet can be linked to more than one, which is what you want for something shared like a common adhesive, and it is the link that makes "who brought this on site" answerable later.

Bulk Upload takes a batch of PDFs dropped in together and runs the same extraction over each, which is the sane way to load a register at the start of a job rather than one sheet at a time.

The GHS hazard data

The extraction reads the manufacturer and product name from Section 1, and out of Section 2 the hazard classification, the GHS pictograms, the signal word of Danger or Warning, and every H code and P code with its full text. It also picks up the emergency contact number and the issue date.

Check it before saving. It is reading a PDF that every manufacturer lays out differently, and the fields it is least sure of are the dates. The pictograms are the ones worth a second look, because they are what a worker actually reads off the register.

Duplicates and the UFI

Teralo checks a new sheet against the register on the UFI, the unique formula identifier, and where the sheet carries no UFI, on the product name and manufacturer together. It warns rather than blocks, because two genuinely different products do occasionally share a name, but a warning here almost always means somebody else has already registered the thing you are holding.

Review and status

A sheet arrives For review. From there it can be:

  • Accepted, which is what makes it a live entry on the register
  • Rejected, with a comment saying why, so the person who submitted it knows what to fix
  • Not in use, for a substance that is no longer on site

Only accepted sheets count as available, and that matters beyond the register: permits and method statements both link to sheets, and it is the accepted ones they can reach. A permit for hot work on a solvent whose sheet is still sitting in review is a permit missing its own paperwork.

Superseding a sheet

When a manufacturer reissues a sheet, add the new one and mark it as replacing the old. The old sheet stays in the register as history rather than being deleted, and it stops appearing everywhere the current sheet is expected. Deleting the superseded sheet instead loses the record of what people were working with last year, which is exactly the question an investigation asks.

The public register

The project's public portal can publish the SDS register, and this is the version anybody on site can reach from a phone without a Teralo account.

It shows accepted, current sheets and nothing else. A rejected sheet, one still in review, one marked not in use and one that has been superseded are all absent, which is the correct behaviour and also the reason a register left un-reviewed is worse than useless: sheets sitting in For review are invisible to the people who would need them in an emergency.

SettingsHost only

Tools, then Safety Data Sheets holds one thing, the review workflow. There are no types or categories to configure here, because a safety data sheet is a safety data sheet.

The binding lives at organisation level and a project can override it, unless the organisation has locked it. Locking is the right call where the review has to be the same on every job. See Organisation level and project level and The tools catalogue.

PermissionsHost only

  • Can view the Safety Data Sheet register shows the sidebar item and the register
  • Can create and submit Safety Data Sheet entries allows adding sheets, including in bulk
  • Can review, accept, and manage all Safety Data Sheet entries allows the status decisions and the tool settings
  • Can permanently delete Safety Data Sheet entries is separate, and is not implied by managing

Creating implies viewing, and managing implies creating, so grant the highest one somebody needs rather than stacking them. Give every subcontractor the create permission and the review permission to the safety manager: that split is the tool working as intended, with the people bringing substances on site responsible for declaring them and one person responsible for the register being true. See How permissions work.

Editing a sheet during the revise loop is restricted to the organisation that submitted it, on top of the permission, so one subcontractor cannot rewrite another's declaration.

WorkflowsHost only

The review runs on a bound workflow: a decision that accepts or rejects, usually with a revise step so a rejected sheet goes back to whoever submitted it rather than dying. Managers can act on any step; the revise step belongs to the submitting organisation.

Build it in the workflow builder and attach it as described in Binding a workflow to a tool.