Questions safeguarding leads ask us

Yes. Fourteen days, no card, nothing to cancel. Your board opens with four sample people already on it, one whose certificate is no longer current and one whose details do not match, so you can see what a board looks like before you put a real name into it. You can add up to five of your own people during the trial. If you run out of time you can give yourself one more week from inside the board. Start a trial.

One monthly plan by headcount, from £5 a month plus VAT, with everyone on your team able to log in. Pay annually and it is 15% less. Your band is a limit on how many people you can have on your list: when you reach it the board tells you, and the owner can move up a band from Admin; nothing moves you up automatically. Enter your headcount on the pricing page and it shows the band you land in and the ones either side. Groups and partners pay the same prices on one pooled headcount and can sign up online.

No. Daily DBS monitors certificates that are already on the DBS Update Service; it does not issue them. Processing new checks is on our list and is not switched on yet, so today you would keep getting new checks however you get them now, and we monitor them from the day they join the Update Service.

Never. The Update Service tells us only whether a certificate remains current as no further information has been identified since its issue, or is no longer current. If it is no longer current, the person applies for a fresh check and your organisation sees the detail, as now. We do not.

It depends who is asking and what they require. A status check confirms the certificate you already hold is still current, which is what the Update Service exists for and what most inspectors want to see evidenced. But some regulators, funders and contracts specify a new check at a set interval regardless, and a status check does not satisfy that. We will not tell you it does. What we can say is that when something changes you know the same morning rather than at the next renewal.

Every person on your board is checked against the DBS Update Service every morning, and you are emailed the same morning if anything has changed. Alerts fire on a change, not on a state, so a certificate that is no longer current generates one email, not one every day until somebody acts. A check that could not be run is not a change, so it sends no alert; it shows on the board instead (see what happens if the DBS service is unavailable). How it works goes through the daily check step by step.

A check that could not be run is not an alert: nothing is known to have changed, so we do not email you as if it had. What does happen is that the run records the failure against each person rather than skipping them quietly, they keep the status we last confirmed and show under Needs attention on the board, the board shows a notice that the day's checks are not complete, and we are emailed the same morning. We try again four more times through the day, and the people who were missed are checked at the first attempt that gets an answer. We say so because somebody not being checked looks exactly like somebody being checked and found to remain current. The DBS does not publish a status page for the Update Service, so the honest position is that our own record of every call we make is the evidence, and we will show it to you.

The individual has to subscribe themselves, either during the application or within 30 days of the certificate being issued. Helping people through that is on our list and is not switched on yet: today each person joins themselves, and you add them to your board once they are live.

Yes, and it is the better way round. You send a link out through whatever channel your people already trust, and each person confirms their own surname and date of birth, enters their certificate number and ticks their own consent. That is stronger evidence than an administrator typing 'I have their consent' on their behalf, and it means you are not re-keying certificate numbers off an email.

If a subscription lapses, the DBS no longer matches the certificate, our next check reports “Details do not match”, and you get an alert that morning. That answer has three possible causes: the certificate was never registered with the Update Service, its subscription has lapsed, or a detail we hold has been mistyped. We do not assume which, so you check with the person. Until it is sorted nobody is monitoring that certificate.

You take them off checking, which stops the daily check, stops them counting towards your band, and keeps the record and its past results for 90 days, after which they are permanently deleted. Until then it is reversible. Leaving someone on the run after they have gone is both a wasted check and a retention problem, because there is no lawful basis for continuing to check somebody who no longer works for you.

Yes, and yes. A status check can only be made by an organisation that is legally entitled to carry out that level of check and holds the individual's permission. The portal records that consent against each person, and each check is made in your organisation's name. We act as your data processor under a written agreement, which you can read at our data processing agreement.

Your data sits in an encrypted database hosted in London, and the server functions run in London too. Isolation between organisations is enforced by the database itself rather than by the interface, so one customer cannot see another's records. You sign in with your organisation's Google or Microsoft account or with a single-use emailed link, we hold no password, we log every check, every email we send, every change to who has access, every import and every change to a person's record, and we are registered with the ICO (reference ZB390453). If you sign in with Google or Microsoft, whatever multi-factor your organisation applies to that account applies here too; the emailed link inherits nothing. You can also protect your sign-in with an authenticator app of your own, and owners and administrators can be required to use it. Our privacy notice has the detail.

Both, and they are treated differently on purpose. A group is one organisation with several sites, schools, homes or practices — a trust, a nursery chain, a franchise — so head office can see and add people across all of them by default. A partner resells to organisations that are separate legal entities, so each customer's individual records stay private from the partner unless that customer chooses to share them. Either way the headcount is pooled across the whole group, so you buy one band rather than one per location. See partner plans.

There are four levels, and each can do everything the one below it can. A viewer reads the board, each person's history and the results, and can export. A manager also runs the board day to day: adds people, takes them off checking, checks on request and marks alerts as handled. An administrator also runs the organisation: who can sign in and at what level, branding, sharing and support access, and keeping the service running by looking after the payment method. The owner, exactly one person, also holds the account itself: changing or cancelling the plan, and who owns it next. Every change to who can sign in, and at what level, is recorded.

Volunteer checks and Update Service subscriptions are both free from the DBS, so the cash you would save is mostly admin and ID fees plus your own time. The real reason charities use us is that a change is caught in a day rather than up to three years later, and nobody has to run a renewal campaign. The calculator on the pricing page shows both sides honestly, including the cases where we cost you more.

On 5 October 2026 the DBS reduced its fees: Basic and Standard checks went from £21.50 to £20.00, Enhanced from £49.50 to £41.00, and the Update Service subscription from £16.00 to £15.00 a year. Volunteer checks stayed free, and the Update Service stays free for volunteers. Those are the DBS's own fees, not ours, and they are charged at cost. What the change is worth, and what it does not change.

An email the same morning to the contacts you have chosen, naming the person, what changed and what it means, with a link to their record on the board. Alerts for a change of status are sent once, not every day; a manager or above marks them as handled when you have acted. An alert is always a change the DBS has told us about. A check that could not be run at all is not one, and is shown on the board rather than emailed.

Not today. The Update Service is a DBS service covering England and Wales, and there is no equivalent status check we can run against the Scottish or Northern Irish schemes. If you employ people checked under those schemes, we cannot monitor them and would rather tell you that now than have you find out later.

Yes, at any time, as a CSV of every person, their status, last-checked date and the last 12 months of check history. It is what you will want when an inspector, auditor or trustee asks how you know everyone's certificate remains current.

You cancel from the billing page. A monthly plan stops at the end of the month you have paid for; an annual plan runs to the end of the year you have paid for, and the owner turns the renewal off from the same place. Export your data first if you want a copy: if your account is closed, the records of the people on it are permanently deleted 90 days later. A trial has nothing to stop, because we never took a card.