A 400-page manual, turned into a clicklist

BREEAM In-Use International is one of the world's most widely used sustainability assessment schemes for existing buildings — and its technical manual runs to over 400 pages of categories, issues, credit tables, and evidence requirements. Reading it is one thing. Actually running an assessment against it, issue by issue, is another.

This tool takes the manual's own structure — nine categories, each with dozens of individually credited issues — and turns it into something an assessor can actually work through: a clicklist survey where every issue shows its question, its answer options with the credits they carry, the assessment criteria behind them, and the evidence required to back up the answer.

From PDF to data model

The underlying dataset is parsed directly from BRE's Technical Manual SD221, issue by issue: over 130 credited issues spanning Management, Health & Wellbeing, Energy, Transport, Water, Materials, Waste, Land Use & Ecology, and Pollution. Each issue keeps its official code (e.g. HEA 01 — Glazing), its maximum credits, its minimum-standard flag, and its full set of answer options — so the scoring stays traceable back to the source document rather than being a black box.

Three views per report

Each assessment report is organised the way an assessor actually thinks about it:

Report Info — the report name, the target BREEAM rating, and the key building details (type, floor area, year built, occupancy) that give the rest of the survey context.

Survey — the clicklist itself. Switch between the nine categories, answer each issue by selecting the option that matches the building's actual performance, and watch a live progress bar track credits achieved against credits available for that category.

Result — the payoff view. A benchmark bar plots the achieved score against BREEAM's real rating bands (Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Pass, Acceptable), a radar chart shows the credit share earned in each of the nine categories at a glance, and a gap analysis table spells out exactly how many credits short of the target rating each category is.

Why a radar chart, not just a score

A single overall percentage hides where the risk actually lives. A building can be strong on Energy and Water but quietly failing Health & Wellbeing — and a single number won't tell you that. Plotting all nine categories on one radar chart makes an uneven profile visible immediately, the same way it would be immediately obvious to someone standing in the room reading the raw scorecard.

Try it live

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Data model derived from BRE Global's BREEAM In-Use International Technical Manual (SD221). This is an independent practitioner tool and is not affiliated with or certified by BRE Global.