What happens to your Safer Food, Better Business diary when your checks move to an app?

Last checked: 22 October 2026 · 5 min read

Your safe methods stay where they are. The diary can move. Here's what the FSA actually says about it.

Keep your Safer Food, Better Business pack. The safe methods you've written in it are how your kitchen manages food safety, and moving your checks onto a phone doesn't change that. What can move is the diary: the opening and closing checks, the daily sign-off, the fridge readings and the 4-weekly review. The FSA says in plain words that the diary can be kept electronically.

Everything below is for England and Wales, which is where the FSA's SFBB pack applies. For Northern Ireland, the FSA points businesses to its Safe Catering guidance instead.

What the law asks for

The legal requirement is in Article 5 of Regulation 852/2004, which is still part of UK law. Food businesses must "put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure or procedures based on the HACCP principles". One of those principles is "establishing documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business".

Nowhere does the law name a pack, a diary or a format. GOV.UK's guide to food safety management systems says the system you need depends on the size of your business and its risk level and complexity. It describes the SFBB toolkits as "designed for small catering businesses such as restaurants, cafés and takeaways", and says they "can be adapted to suit the size and nature of your business". A larger or higher-risk business may be advised by its council to have a full HACCP plan instead.

SFBB is the FSA's ready-made way for a small kitchen to meet that requirement. It isn't the only way, but for most cafés and pubs it's the obvious one.

What the diary is for

The diary's introduction says the manager should sign it every day to say the opening and closing checks have been done and your safe methods have been followed. It "should take about one minute a day to complete". If something goes wrong, "you should make a note in the diary of what happened and what you did".

Each day on the paper diary page ends with the same sentence: "Our safe methods were followed and effectively supervised today", with a name and a signature underneath. That line matters. It's one person saying they supervised the day.

The opening and closing checks are listed in the pack and you can add your own. Opening covers things like fridges, chilled display and freezers working properly, the probe thermometer working, and allergen information being accurate for everything on sale. Closing includes food covered, labelled and put away, anything on its use-by date thrown out, and "'Prove it' checks have been recorded".

The 4-weekly review

Every four weeks the diary asks you to walk round the kitchen and look back over the last four weeks of entries. The review page says: "If you had a serious problem, or the same thing went wrong three times or more, make a note of it here, find out why and record what you did to resolve it."

It also says the review "requires completion even if no problems have been found". The checklist asks whether allergen information has been updated for menu changes, whether probes have been calibrated in the last four weeks, whether new suppliers have been recorded and whether new staff have been trained.

Can the diary be electronic?

Yes. The FSA's Safer food, better business page on GOV.UK says: "Store all your completed diary pages safely until your next visit from a local authority food safety officer. This can be done electronically or with printed copies." It gives you two options, keeping an electronic diary or printing it and filling it in.

The same page says the pack "must be completed for all your food operations" with "daily records kept in the diary", and that the officer may want to see your diary pages as well as your pack. So whatever you use, the officer should be able to see who checked what, when, what the reading was, and what was done when something wasn't right.

If you change equipment, suppliers or the way you cook something, Article 5 says the procedure has to be reviewed. The 4-weekly review asks the same question, so it's a good place to catch it.

General information for England and Wales, not legal advice. Your council's food safety team can tell you what they expect to see for your kitchen.

Where managero fits

managero isn't connected to the FSA, and it doesn't replace your safe methods. You keep the pack you've written: upload it completed, sign it, and it's kept as that site's food safety plan.

The diary's daily side goes onto the team's phones. Each check turns up on the day it's due: opening and closing, cleaning, deliveries, fridge and freezer temperatures. Every fridge and freezer has its own safe range, and a reading outside it, or a check marked as failed, gets a question there and then about what was done. That answer prints under the problem. It also emails you, and whoever manages that site, when the record is written, and each morning there's an email with the checks done and missed the day before.

Photos attach to the check they belong to, with the time and the name of whoever took them. There's rarely any signal in a walk-in, so a reading taken there is held on the phone, as long as managero is already open, and lands when they step back out. The time stored is the time it was typed.

A manager or the owner signs off each day against the same sentence the paper diary uses, and the four-weekly review is answered and signed in the app. If you already have paper check sheets you like, photograph or upload them and they come back as forms your staff fill in on their phones, with any line it can't read flagged.

When an officer asks, you choose the sites and the dates and get a dated PDF with your business name on it, plus a CSV of the same records. Each week is set out a page at a time, the way the paper diary does it. It's £18.99 a month for your first site.