Council Registers
How to Audit Your Tree Register in One Afternoon
You do not need a six-month consulting engagement to know whether your tree register is healthy. A focused afternoon will tell you most of what you need.
A formal tree register audit is useful, but it is not the only way to find out whether your register is healthy. A focused afternoon by someone who understands council operations will surface most of the issues that matter.
The point is not to produce a perfect score. It is to know, in concrete terms, what is broken and what to fix first.
Pick ten trees you already know about
Choose ten trees you can identify confidently — a heritage tree on a main street, a recent removal site, a tree that has had multiple resident complaints, a tree that was inspected last quarter. The register should be able to tell you the truth about each one.
For each tree, open the record and ask:
- Is the location correct?
- Is the species correct?
- Is the latest known condition consistent with what you know is true?
- Is the most recent inspection recorded?
- Is the most recent work order closed out?
- Is the evidence attached, or does it live in someone else's inbox?
You are not looking for one or two gaps. You are looking for patterns.
Run six simple counts
Most register health problems show up in straightforward counts:
- How many trees in the register have no inspection in the last five years?
- How many have a risk rating but no recorded follow-up action?
- How many have follow-up actions older than their target timeframe?
- How many have a "removed" status but appear in current planting or maintenance lists?
- How many have no asset ID?
- How many recent contractor jobs do not appear against any tree record?
Even rough numbers are useful. A register where 60% of trees have no recent inspection is in a different conversation from one where 10% do.
Look at the workflow, not just the data
Data quality is downstream of workflow. Spend an hour walking through how an inspection, a work order and a resident request actually travel through the system today. Ask:
- Where does the inspection result land? Does it reach the tree record?
- Where does the work order close out? Does the tree record change?
- Where do resident requests live? Are they ever joined to a tree?
- Who is responsible for register quality? Can they name what they are responsible for?
A clean answer to those questions is rarer than it sounds.
Write down three fixes
End the afternoon with three specific changes you will make in the next quarter. Not ten. Three. The most common high-leverage fixes are:
- Require inspection closeout to update the condition rating on the tree record
- Require work order closeout to attach evidence to the tree record
- Move the risk follow-up list from someone's head to a shared, ageing list with a named owner
Those three changes typically explain most of what is wrong with a register that is drifting. They are also reasonable to do in-house without procurement.
What an afternoon audit will not tell you
It will not tell you whether the spatial accuracy of your inventory is suitable for canopy modelling. It will not tell you whether your inspection methodology meets QTRA requirements. It will not produce a published audit report.
It will tell you whether the register is doing its operational job. That is usually the more pressing question.