Who this is forAnyone who has been handed a consent, a licence or a CEMP and told to keep the project compliant: environmental advisors, site engineers, project managers, and the person on a small job who is all three.
Every construction project in Australia carries a set of conditions it must comply with, and almost every project starts tracking them in a spreadsheet. Most of those spreadsheets are built from scratch on a Sunday night, a week before the first audit. This one is built in advance. It is a free Excel workbook that holds every condition from the development consent, the environment protection licence, an EPBC approval, the CEMP and the construction certificate in one register, with the columns an auditor expects and twelve worked example rows so you can see the level of detail that holds up.
No sign-up, no email. The file is about 25 KB and opens in Excel 2010 or later, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. The dropdowns and the summary formulas work in all three.
What is in the workbook
- Read me. Purpose, how to use it, a legend for each dropdown, and an at-a-glance summary that counts the register live: conditions by status, overdue rows, rows due in the next 30 days, rows nobody has verified in 90 days, and a total by instrument. All formulas, nothing typed.
- Register. One row per condition. Condition number, instrument, the verbatim condition, the plain-English requirement, condition type, trigger, due date, responsible party, status, evidence reference, last verified and notes. The header is frozen and filtered, statuses and triggers are dropdowns, dates are real dates, and a due date that has passed on an open row turns red.
- Lookups. The lists behind the dropdowns. Add a responsible party or a condition type here and the register picks it up.
The twelve examples belong to a fictional NSW road upgrade with a DA consent, an EPL, an EPBC approval and a CEMP. They cover the conditions most sites carry: the CEMP submitted before commencement, ESC inspections after 10 mm of rain, dewatering discharge limits, noise at sensitive receivers, monthly dust monitoring, spoil dockets, heritage exclusion zones, the monthly monitoring report to the EPA, a sediment basin hold point, a construction certificate deliverable, landscaping before the occupation certificate and the EPBC annual compliance report. Delete them and start typing.
What a register has to hold
A register is not a list of conditions. It is the project's answer to three questions for every condition: what exactly does it require, what has been done about it, and where is the proof. The columns follow from that.
- The condition, verbatim. Copy it in as written. Paraphrasing at this stage is how a limit of 50 mg/L becomes "low TSS" and how a condition that says within 24 hours becomes "promptly". The interpretation goes in the next column, where it can be argued with.
- The plain-English requirement. What the site actually has to do, in one or two sentences a leading hand would understand. This is the column crews read.
- Type and trigger. A deliverable due before commencement is managed very differently from a continuous limit on discharge water or a report due on the seventh of every month. Typing each condition is what lets you sort the register into the work it generates: documents to produce, hold points that stop work, monitoring cadences, reports and standing rules. The trigger says when it bites: before commencement, before the CC, before the OC, ongoing, or when something happens such as rain, a complaint or an anniversary.
- One owner. A name or a role, and only one. A condition with two owners is a condition nobody checks.
- Status with an evidence reference. The status is a claim. The evidence reference is what backs it. A row marked Complete with an empty evidence column is the first thing an auditor will pull on. Our guide to the condition evidence pack covers what that reference needs to point to.
- Last verified. The date somebody last checked the row against the evidence rather than against their memory. Ongoing conditions do not have a due date, so this is the only column that tells you whether they have been looked at.
When a spreadsheet is enough
Honestly, quite often. One instrument on one site, under about 150 conditions, with one person who owns the register and updates it weekly, is well within what Excel does properly. The template will carry that project from consent to close-out. If that is your project, take the file and do not pay anyone for software until it stops working.
It stops working in predictable ways, and it pays to know them in advance.
- More than one person edits it. Two copies appear, one on the shared drive and one on a laptop, and the audit finds the older one. Locking the file fixes the conflict and creates a bottleneck instead.
- The evidence lives somewhere else. The register says "see folder ESC-INSP". The folder has 340 photos named IMG_4127.jpg. The link between the row and the proof is in the head of the person who filed it, and that person has moved to the next job.
- Somebody asks for the history. A spreadsheet holds the current state of each row. It cannot say who changed the status from In progress to Complete, when, or what the evidence reference read before it was overwritten. Auditors ask for exactly that, and the guide to what auditors actually ask for explains why.
- Triggers depend on memory. The register says inspect within 24 hours of 10 mm of rain. Nothing in the spreadsheet knows it rained. The guide to ESC inspections after rainfall covers what a missed trigger looks like on paper.
- The instruments multiply. A corridor project with a consent, two EPLs, an EPBC approval and a CEMP with six sub-plans produces several hundred rows and a condition numbering scheme that repeats across instruments. Filters help. They do not make it one register.
Importing it into claused.
claused. reads this file as it is. Upload it on the import screen and the Register sheet is picked up by name, the condition number, due date, responsible party and status columns are mapped automatically, and the remaining columns are confirmed on the mapping step before anything is written. Each row becomes a condition with its own evidence trail, and the statuses Complete, Awaiting review and In progress land as verified or in progress on the register. If you have already built a register in this shape, you do not start again, and pricing is one price per project with every user included.
The template is general information, not legal advice. The conditions that bind a project are the ones written in its own instruments, and the example rows are invented. If you find a column missing that your auditor keeps asking for, tell us at support@claused.com.au and it will go into the next version.
Frequently asked questions
What is a conditions of consent register?
A register holds one row per condition from every instrument that binds the project, with the condition as written, the plain-English requirement, the trigger, an owner, a status and a reference to the evidence. It is the document an auditor works from, and the one a site uses to plan the work the conditions generate.
Which instruments should go into the register?
Everything that carries an enforceable obligation: the development consent, the environment protection licence, any EPBC approval, the construction certificate and the approved management plans such as the CEMP and its sub-plans. Keep the instrument name beside each condition number, because numbering repeats across documents.
Is the template free, and does it need a sign-up?
It is free and there is no sign-up. The workbook downloads directly with no email or account, opens in Excel 2010 or later, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, and can be edited without restriction.
When does a spreadsheet stop being enough?
When more than one person edits it, when the evidence lives in folders the register only points at, when someone asks for the history of a row, when triggers such as rainfall depend on memory, or when several instruments push the register past a few hundred rows. Until then it does the job.
Can the template be imported into claused.?
Yes. The Register sheet is picked up by name, the condition number, due date, responsible party and status columns are mapped automatically, and the remaining columns are confirmed on the mapping step before anything is written.