Every workplace in the country has a file called something like PPE tracking.xlsx. It was built by somebody who has since left, it has a column that adds a year to a date by hand, and nobody is sure any more whether row 47 is current.
This page does two things that file does badly: the date arithmetic, and telling you where each interval comes from.
The second is the one that matters most here, and it is harder in Canada than anywhere else this site covers. There is no national answer. Ontario makes a specific training programme mandatory with a three-year validity; Alberta does not have the same instrument; British Columbia writes its requirements into a regulation with a different structure again. A tracker that offers one Canadian interval per item is telling three out of four readers something wrong.
So the suggested intervals below are labelled, sourced, and — where they are provincial — say which province.
First: which rules apply to you
Roughly 6 % of the Canadian workforce is federally regulated — interprovincial and international transport, railways, airlines, marine, banking, telecommunications and broadcasting, grain, uranium, the federal public service, and certain First Nations community services. Those workplaces follow Part II of the Canada Labour Code and the regulations made under it.
Everyone else follows a provincial or territorial act. That is where the substance sits, and four provinces carry most of the readership of this page: Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. Their duties genuinely differ, which is the whole reason this tool asks you for the interval rather than asserting one.
One thing that generalises across all of them: the manufacturer’s instructions are binding on you. Provincial regulations routinely require equipment to be inspected, maintained and used as the manufacturer specifies. That is not a soft recommendation — it is the mechanism by which a document written by a company in another country becomes a legal obligation on your site. Which is why the tool takes an end-of-service-life date as well as an inspection interval.
The rule that decides: the earliest date
This is the structural failure of the home-made spreadsheet: it tracks one date per line.
Three clocks run on the same piece of equipment:
- The next scheduled inspection.
- The manufacturer’s end of service life, counted from manufacture or from first use depending on the instructions.
- Your own internal rule, where it is stricter — and on hard jobs it often should be.
The governing date is the earliest of the three. A harness inspected last month whose service life expired last year is out of service. A spreadsheet that only tracks inspections will never say so, and the day somebody notices is usually the day somebody fell.
The tool takes both dates and keeps the nearer one. It is a small thing. It is also exactly what the spreadsheet does not do.
The intervals, and what each rests on
Fall-protection equipment: annually, by a competent person
An annual inspection by a competent person is the practice set out in the CSA Z259 series and required by essentially every manufacturer. Provincial regulations generally reach the same result by requiring you to follow the manufacturer’s instructions.
What it does not replace: the pre-use check before every shift, by the person wearing it. That is what finds the real damage — a cut in webbing, a chemical burn, a distorted snap hook. The annual inspection is an administrative backstop; the pre-use check is the safety.
And a component that has arrested a fall comes out of service permanently, whatever its inspection date says.
Working at Heights training: three years — in Ontario
Anyone on a construction project in Ontario who uses a method of fall protection must have completed a Chief Prevention Officer–approved Working at Heights programme, and the training is valid for three years from successful completion.
Read the scope carefully, because it is narrower and wider than people assume:
- It applies to construction projects, not to every workplace with a fall hazard.
- It is Ontario’s instrument. Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec each require fall-protection training, on their own terms and without the same three-year certificate. If you operate across provinces, you are tracking several different things that all look like “fall protection training” in a spreadsheet column.
- It sits on top of equipment-specific training. Knowing the theory of fall arrest is not the same as being trained on the anchor system installed at your site.
First aid certificates: three years
Three years is the usual validity issued by approved providers. The part that is regulated is different, and often missed: how many certified first aiders you must have, at what level, and how close to the work is set by your province’s first aid regulation, and it varies with headcount, hazard rating and travel time to medical care.
That means the interesting deadline is often not the certificate’s expiry but a change in the workplace. Adding a night shift, or moving a crew to a remote site, can put you out of compliance with certificates that are all perfectly current.
Everything else: you set the interval
For the majority of equipment, no rule states a period. The obligation is of a different kind: you determine the interval and must be able to justify it — from the manufacturer’s instructions, the conditions of use, and your hazard assessment.
That is not a gap. A written, dated interval attached to an assessment holds up in an inspection. An interval nobody can explain does not, however short it is.
What the tool does, and what it does not
It adds months to a date, keeps the earliest deadline, sorts by urgency and exports. That is all, deliberately.
It stores nothing. Reload the page and the table is empty. Not a technical limitation: a register that lives in one browser profile is worse than a file, because it vanishes with the machine, cannot be shared, and is never backed up. Export it, and keep the file where the rest of your evidence lives.
It sends nothing. No network request leaves this page. Your workers’ names and your dates stay on your device, which is also the answer to the privacy question any named equipment register raises.
It does not know your kit. The suggested intervals are starting points for common cases. Your manufacturer’s instructions are more precise than any generic list, and they are the ones that bind you.
Adding months, done properly
A technical detail with real consequences: adding one month to 31 January should give 28 or 29 February, not 2 or 3 March. JavaScript’s native date method does the second; spreadsheets do one or the other depending on the formula. On a twelve-month interval the difference never shows. On a one- or three-month interval applied at a month end, it shifts the whole series.
This tool clamps to the last day of the target month — what every calendar application does, and what “every six months” means to a person.
The calendar export
The export button produces a standard .ics file, one all-day event per deadline, with a reminder thirty days ahead. It imports into Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and most things in between.
Two things worth knowing:
- The event identifiers are deterministic. Re-importing an updated schedule updates the entries rather than duplicating them, as long as the rows have not been reordered.
- A calendar is not evidence. It reminds you to do the inspection; it does not show that you did. The signed inspection record is what does that, and it belongs somewhere else.
What to keep as evidence
A deadline met but not documented reads, in an inspection, exactly like a deadline missed. Per item and per person:
- Inspection records, with the date, the inspector’s identity and competency, and what was done about any defect found. An open defect is a finding on its own.
- Manufacturer’s instructions, particularly service life and removal-from-service criteria. This is the document that binds you and the one nobody can ever find.
- Individual traceability for PPE: serial number, in-service date, who holds it. Without a unique identifier, no tracking is really defensible — two harnesses of the same model are two different objects with two different histories.
- Removal-from-service records, with reason and date. Equipment taken out of service and found back in a truck three months later is an incident, not an oversight.
- Training records and certificates, with the provider and the programme, and — for Ontario Working at Heights — the approved provider’s details.
- Your written intervals and why. Three lines. It is what turns a tracker into a management system, and it is the first thing you will be asked for.
If your method is better
This page describes common practice, sourced where it can be. It is not the only defensible approach, and equipment scheduling is exactly where safety people have invented the best workarounds: a colour-coded tag system readable from across a yard, a fifteen-minute Monday routine, a stores process that makes the check impossible to skip.
If you have one that works — especially one that survives operating in several provinces at once — that is precisely what this site exists to collect and give back to the trade.