By Propane Safety Pro
Nobody gets sued for the inspection they did. They get sued for the one they can't prove.
Your driver pulls up to a tank. Before he ever pulls the hose, he looks — at the regulator, the valve, the piping, the set. He is asking himself one question: is it safe for me to put gas in this? That look takes about thirty seconds, and he does it twenty-five to thirty times a day.
Now answer this. Where does that look end up?
Where it ends up today
On a paper ticket in a truck, if you're lucky. In his head, most days.
He is not walking back to the cab for a clipboard in the rain, and paper in the rain is useless anyway. So the real documentation system in most propane companies is this: the driver remembers what he saw, and at five o'clock he tells a busy office person, along with nine other things she is already handling.
That is not a knock on your crew. It is the job. But it means the only inspection most tanks ever get is one that leaves no trace.
Because here is the part people forget: a full system safety check happens at an install, after an out-of-gas call, or when the house sells and new people move in. A tank that never runs out and never changes hands can go a long, long time between full checks. Your drivers' thirty-second looks are the only eyes on it in between.
The arithmetic nobody runs
Take one hour a day, per field employee, spent on paperwork. That is the low end of what field crews lose to it — forty-five minutes to an hour is the honest range.
Run it on an eight-person crew:
- 8 people × 1 hour a day × about 250 working days = 2,000 hours a year
- Gray, Gray & Gray's 2025 National Propane Industry Survey puts the average propane driver at $29.08 an hour. Call it $29.
- 2,000 hours × $29 = roughly $58,000 a year
Change any number to your own and the answer moves. That is the point — run it on your crew size and your own loaded rate, which is higher than the wage line. Most operators have never done the multiplication, and it is a bigger number than the one they were worried about.
And that $58,000 is only the cost of doing the paperwork. It says nothing about what a missing page costs.
The question that isn't the question
When something goes wrong, everybody's first instinct is to ask whether the crew was trained.
That is rarely the fight. Most propane companies train their people. They send them to CETP, they run the DOT refreshers, they bring somebody in for hands-on work at the yard.
The fight is over the record.
An inspector does not ask whether you trained the crew. He asks to see the file. Your insurer asks for the same thing at renewal. A plaintiff's attorney asks for it in discovery, and he is not looking for the inspection you did — he is looking for the twelve you can't produce.
Good training and no paper trail is a company that did everything right and cannot show it.
So: we do the paperwork. Trainers do the training. Your instructor runs the classroom, runs the skills work, signs off on the crew. Good trainers are worth what they cost, and we will happily name you a few. What we build is everything underneath — the records, the manuals, the field documentation, the file somebody actually asks for.
What an audit actually asks for
It is a shorter list than most operators expect, and almost nobody has all of it current.
Policies and procedures. How your company actually runs — your yard, your trucks, your routes. Not a binder off a shelf with somebody else's name in the header. Everything else hangs off this document, because it is what your crew gets trained to.
→ Policies and Procedures
An operations and maintenance manual. What gets checked, how often, by whom, and what happens when it fails.
→ Operations & Maintenance Manuals
A written security plan. If you haul propane in a cargo tank, you are supposed to have one in writing, reviewed on a schedule, with the related training documented.
→ Security Plans
A fire safety analysis. Required for bulk plants, and the one document most likely to be sitting in a drawer three revisions out of date.
→ Fire Safety Analysis Manual
An emergency action plan. What your people do in the first four minutes, written down before they need it.
→ Emergency Action Plans
Duty-to-warn documentation. Proof you told the customer what they needed to know — and when.
→ Duty to Warn
Safety data sheets and hazard communication. On site, current, and findable.
→ SDS Binder & HazCom
Training records. Who completed what, when, and when it expires.
→ Training
Then there is the daily layer that sits on top of all of it: the inspections, the leak checks after a service interruption, the cathodic checks, the meter creep tests, the gas system checks a driver does on a delivery stop. Those happen every day, in the field, far from a filing cabinet.
Why this got harder in 2025, not easier
PERC is retiring CETP and replacing it with PEP, the PERC Education Program. Your existing CETP completions are still good — nothing expired the day PEP started, and they stay on the transcript.
But look at what changed. Under CETP, an employee passed an exam and held a certificate. Under PEP, there is no certification exam and no skills evaluation. Learners are tested at the end of each module, and completions show up on an online transcript. PERC says it plainly in their own FAQ: does PEP still provide certification? No.
So the industry just moved from "he holds a certificate" to "there's a line on a transcript."
Meanwhile plenty of state licensing rules still name CETP outright — Pennsylvania, for one, requires CETP training of LP-Gas Technician License applicants — and your insurer still has CETP in the file. Rules move; confirm anything state-specific with your own regulator before you act on it.
Read that whole picture and one thing falls out: the record you keep on your own crew's work matters more now than it did three years ago, not less. The credential got thinner. Your documentation is what got thicker.
What a record has to look like to be worth anything
A record that shows up a week late, in handwriting, with no date on it, is not much of a record.
Four things have to be on it, and they have to land at the moment the work happens:
- When. Automatically, not from memory at five o'clock.
- Where. The location, captured at the tank.
- What it looked like. A photograph beats a description in every room where this ever gets read.
- Who says so. A signature attached to a name.
That is what the Propane Safety App does. Your driver taps preset buttons, snaps a photo, talks a note into it if he wants one, and the date, the location and the signature attach themselves.
Here is the part that decides whether your crew actually uses it: all of that happens inside the thirty seconds he already spends looking at the tank. It is not a second task bolted onto his day. It is the same look, coming back as a record. Then it is at the office before he is back in the cab.
It works with no cell signal, which is not a nice-to-have. A large share of propane field work happens where there is no service, and it is not getting service any time soon. An app that needs bars is an app your crew stops using in week two.
And when the work comes back short — a reading out of range, a step skipped, a photo missing — the app flags it while your man is still standing there. That is the difference between a callback and a correction.
The Propane Safety App is Tank Spotter's safety pillar. Same app, same records.
What we do, and what we don't
We do the paperwork. Trainers do the training.
We are not going to teach your crew. We are going to make sure that when somebody asks what your crew did — an inspector, an underwriter, an attorney, or you at eleven o'clock at night — the answer takes about nine seconds to find instead of two days.
Your trainer runs the classroom. We run the paper trail.
See what your file is missing. Tell us what your crew does and where they sit, and we will walk your roster with you — what you are supposed to have, what you actually have, and what it takes to close the gap. If part of that gap is classroom hours, we will point you at a trainer who can do it.
Get a demo Or call 610-228-0887
Frequently asked questions
What compliance paperwork does a propane company have to keep?
At minimum: written policies and procedures, an operations and maintenance manual, a written security plan if you haul in a cargo tank, a fire safety analysis for bulk plants, an emergency action plan, duty-to-warn documentation, safety data sheets, and training records for every employee. On top of that sits the daily field layer — inspections, leak checks after a service interruption, cathodic checks, meter creep tests.
Are my employees' CETP certifications still good now that PEP has replaced CETP?
Yes. Existing CETP completions remain valid and stay on the PERC transcript. Nothing expired the day PEP started. What changed going forward is that PEP has no certification exam and no skills evaluation — completions are recorded on an online transcript instead. Many state licensing rules still reference CETP by name, so confirm your own state's current requirement with its regulator.
Does a propane safety app replace training?
No, and it should not claim to. Training is delivered by a trainer and credentialed by PERC. An app documents that it happened, tracks when refreshers come due, and captures the field work in between. Those are two different jobs, and doing one well does not do the other.
What does a documented tank inspection actually need on it?
A date, a location, a photograph, and a signature — all captured when the work happens, not reconstructed later. A record written from memory at the end of the day is worth far less than one captured at the tank.
Will documenting inspections slow my drivers down?
It shouldn't. Your driver already spends about thirty seconds looking at each tank before he pulls the hose. The capture happens inside that same thirty seconds — preset buttons, a photo, and the date, location and signature attach themselves. It is the same look, coming back as a record.
How much time do propane field crews lose to paperwork?
Field employees commonly lose forty-five minutes to an hour a day to it. On an eight-person crew that is roughly 2,000 hours a year. At the $29.08 average hourly driver wage in Gray, Gray & Gray's 2025 National Propane Industry Survey, that is around $58,000. Run the multiplication on your own crew size and loaded rate — the number is usually larger than operators expect.
Does the app work where there's no cell service?
Yes. A large share of propane field work happens with no signal, so the app is built to work on or off the cell grid and sync when it reconnects.
See what your file is missing.
Tell us what your crew does and where they sit. We will tell you what you are supposed to have, what you actually have, and what it takes to close the gap.
Or call 610-228-0887
Propane Safety Pro · Digital Software Services, LLC · 112 Holby Lane, Pottstown, PA 19465