New: Photograph a Certificate and HouseFile Files It for You

The gas engineer finishes the annual check, hands you a paper certificate or WhatsApps you a photo of it, and drives off. What happens to that photo next is where compliance quietly goes wrong: it sits in your camera roll as IMG_4231.jpg, unnamed, unfiled, with an expiry date nobody wrote down. From today, HouseFile fixes that step for you — photograph the certificate and HouseFile reads it, names it, files it, and books the renewal reminder.

What's New

HouseFile has always auto-detected clearly named PDFs — upload gas-safety-2026.pdf and it would land in the right checklist slot. But that only worked when the file had extractable text and a sensible name. Real landlord paperwork often has neither: scanned certificates are just pictures inside a PDF, and photos from an engineer arrive with names like IMG_4231.jpg or WhatsApp Image 2026-07-04.jpg.

Now HouseFile reads the document itself — the way a person would. Whether it's a crisp digital PDF, a scan, or a slightly crumpled photo taken on your phone, HouseFile identifies:

• What it is — gas safety certificate, EICR, EPC, deposit protection certificate, tenancy agreement, HMO licence, and every other document type in your compliance checklist
• When it expires — the explicit expiry or next-due date, read the way UK documents write it (2/7/2027 means 2 July, not 7 February)
• When it was issued and its reference number — saved into the document's notes for your records

And if a certificate states an issue date but no expiry, HouseFile applies the standard UK validity period — twelve months for a gas safety record, five years for an EICR, ten for an EPC — so the renewal reminder still gets set.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The gas engineer hands you the certificate. You open the property in HouseFile on your phone, tap upload, and photograph it. A few seconds later the upload form is already filled in: Gas Safety Certificate (CP12), filed under Legal Requirements, expiry next July, certificate number in the notes. You glance at it, confirm, and you're done — the renewal reminder is booked and the certificate is ready to share with your tenant for a timestamped acknowledgment.

The same reading step runs everywhere you add documents:

• Bulk upload — drop a folder of mixed scans, photos, and PDFs and each one identifies itself
• Checklist slots — drag a renewal onto its slot and the new expiry date replaces the old one automatically
• The camera button — photograph paper documents straight into the property from your phone
• Single document uploads — the form pre-fills instead of starting blank

You Stay in Control

Everything HouseFile detects is shown to you before anything is saved — the title, the category, and the expiry date are all editable fields, not silent decisions. If a document can't be identified (say, a boiler service invoice), it's added with a sensible descriptive title and HouseFile suggests any required documents still missing from your checklist, so one tap files it correctly.

Nothing changes about sharing: documents are only visible to your tenant when you choose to share them, exactly as before.

A note on how it works: the reading is powered by Claude, the AI model built by Anthropic. Documents are processed only to fill in the fields you see and are not used to train AI models. Clean digital PDFs are still classified instantly on our own servers — the AI step only runs when a document actually needs reading.

Why It Matters for Compliance

Most compliance failures aren't caused by landlords ignoring the rules — they're caused by paperwork friction. The certificate that never made it out of the camera roll. The expiry date that never made it into a calendar. The gas safety renewal that slipped because the reminder lived in someone's head.

Removing the typing, naming, and date-hunting removes the friction — and with it, most of the ways documents fall through the cracks. The certificate is filed the moment it exists, the renewal is booked the moment it's filed, and the proof-of-delivery trail starts the moment you share it.

Try It

The feature is live now for every HouseFile account, on every plan, at no extra cost. Open any property, tap upload, and photograph whatever paper certificate is nearest — you'll see it file itself. If you're setting up your first property, the setup guide walks through the whole flow, and the default checklist gives you every legally required document slot to fill.