How to Create a Digital JSA in Minutes

If you're still doing JSAs on paper or in Excel, this video is for you. I'm going to show you two ways to go digital today. First, I'll walk you through our free JSA builder - no signup, no credit card, you'll have a professional PDF in about five minutes. Then I'll show you what it looks like when your whole team is running JSAs through the full platform - templates, approval workflows, crew sign-off, the whole thing. Let's get into it.

Head to basincheck.com/tools/jsa-builder. You'll land on a page with some educational content about what a JSA is, the Fatal 8 hazards, oilfield-specific requirements - good reference material if you need it. But the builder itself is right here at the top. You'll see a note that the PDF will include BasinCheck branding. If you want your own company branding, that's in the full platform - but for a quick JSA, this gets the job done.

First thing - fill in your job information. Four fields here: Job Title - what's the task? I'll type 'Hot Work Operations - Wellhead Repair.' Location - where's the work happening? 'Well Pad A-7, Delaware Basin.' Date - defaults to today, which is usually what you want for a pre-job JSA. Supervisor - optional, but go ahead and put the responsible person's name. Job title, location, and date are required. Supervisor is optional.

Now the core of your JSA - breaking the job into steps. You start with one step, and you can add up to ten. Click 'Add Step' to add more. For each step, you need three things: what's the task, what are the hazards, and what are the controls. Let me build out Step 1. The task is 'Set up work area and verify isolation.' Now I'll add a hazard - click 'Add Hazard.' You get a dropdown of hazard categories. These include all of the Fatal 8 - Struck-By, Caught-In/Between, Falls, Dropped Objects, Pressure Release, Vehicle Incidents, Burns, Electrocution - plus H2S, Fire/Explosion, Ergonomic, and Environmental. I'll select 'Burns' from the Fatal 8, and describe the specific hazard: 'Hot surfaces on adjacent piping.' You can add up to five hazards per step. Let me add another one - 'Pressure Release' - 'Residual pressure in wellhead connections.' Now for control measures. Click 'Add Control.' You pick a control type from the Hierarchy of Controls - Elimination, Substitution, Engineering Controls, Administrative Controls, or PPE. OSHA wants you thinking top-down on that hierarchy. I'll add an Engineering Control: 'Verify zero-energy state, bleed pressure, install blinds.' And an Administrative Control: 'Conduct pre-job safety briefing, verify isolation tags.' And PPE: 'FR clothing, face shield, leather gloves.'

Here's where it gets visual. Each step has two risk matrices side by side - 'Risk Before Controls' and 'Risk After Controls.' It's a standard 5-by-5 matrix. Likelihood on the vertical axis - from Rare up to Almost Certain. Severity on the horizontal - from Negligible to Catastrophic. Click a cell and it calculates your risk score. For this step, before controls I'd say likelihood is 'Possible' and severity is 'Major' - that gives me a score of 12, High Risk - you can see it lights up orange. After I apply those controls? Likelihood drops to 'Unlikely,' severity stays 'Moderate' - score of 6, Medium Risk, shown in yellow. That's the risk reduction your controls are buying you. When you collapse a step, you'll see that risk score right in the header, so you can scan your whole JSA at a glance.

Below your steps, you've got a PPE checklist. Twelve options covering the essentials - Hard Hat, Safety Glasses, Face Shield, Hearing Protection, Steel Toe Boots, FR Clothing, Work Gloves, Chemical Gloves, Respirator, H2S Monitor, Fall Protection, and High-Vis Vest. Check everything that applies to this job. And there's a notes section for anything else - permits required, emergency procedures, special conditions. You've got 500 characters.

At the bottom you'll see a summary - how many steps, hazards, and controls you've built. If anything's missing, it'll tell you what needs to be fixed. Hit 'Download PDF' and you'll get a prompt. You can enter your email to get a backup copy sent to you - and optionally sign up for OSHA deadline reminders, which is handy if you're tracking 300A posting deadlines. Or you can skip the email entirely and just download. Either way, you get a professional PDF with your job info, PPE requirements, every step with hazards, controls, risk scores, and signature lines at the bottom for prepared-by and supervisor approval. That's it for the free tool. No account needed, take it to the field, print it out, done.

Now, that free builder is great for one-off JSAs. But if you're running a crew, and you're doing fifteen or twenty JSAs a week across multiple job sites, you need something more. You need templates so your guys aren't starting from scratch every time. You need an approval workflow so a supervisor signs off before work starts. You need to track who was briefed. And you need all of it in one place for when an operator or OSHA shows up for an audit. That's what the full JSA module does. Let me show you.

When you log into BasinCheck and go to JSAs, you land on the list page. Right at the top you've got five status cards giving you a snapshot: how many are in Draft, Pending Approval, Approved, In Progress, and Completed. Each JSA card shows you the job title, status badge, scheduled date, location, crew count, step count, and PPE count. If a JSA is scheduled for today, it gets a 'Today' badge. If the date has passed and it's not completed, you'll see an 'Overdue' warning. You also see risk scores right on the card - Initial Risk and Residual Risk - so you can quickly spot the high-risk jobs.

Click 'New JSA' in the top right. First thing you'll see is a template selector. If your company has set up templates - and I recommend you do - you can load one up and it pre-fills your steps, hazards, controls, and default PPE. We support nine job types out of the box: Hot Work, Confined Space, Lifting Operations, Electrical Work, Excavation, Working at Height, Pressure Testing, Rig Move, and General. Your safety manager can create custom templates for any recurring job your crews do. Let me select 'Hot Work' - watch how it loads the template steps automatically. Now I can customize anything I need to for this specific job. The form is similar to the free tool but with more fields. You've got: - Job Title and an optional Job/Work Order Number for tracking - Location and Scheduled Date - both required - Scheduled Time - optional but useful for shift planning Then there's a Crew Members section. Add your crew - names, roles - and if your company has attendance tracking enabled, there's a checkbox to mark who was present for the JSA briefing. You can add up to twenty crew members. The steps section works the same way - task description, hazards with categories, controls with the hierarchy of controls, and those 5-by-5 risk matrices. But in the full platform you can have up to fifteen steps, eight hazards per step, and twelve controls per step. More room for complex jobs. Your PPE checklist and additional notes section are the same.

At the bottom you get two options: Save Draft or Save & Submit. Save Draft keeps it editable - you or your crew lead can come back and finish it later. This is great when you're building the JSA in the office the day before. Save & Submit locks it in and sends it up for approval. Your safety manager gets notified that there's a JSA waiting for review. That JSA is now in 'Pending Approval' status and nobody can edit it until it's been approved or rejected. I'll hit Save & Submit.

Now I'll switch to the safety manager's view. When I open this JSA, I can see everything - the job details, all the steps with hazards and controls, risk scores, crew list, PPE requirements. As the approver, I have two buttons: Approve and Reject. If I hit Approve, I get a dialog where I can add optional approval notes - maybe 'Ensure fire watch maintains position for 30 minutes after work completes.' Click 'Approve JSA' and it moves to Approved status. The approval is recorded with my name and timestamp. If something's not right - maybe a step is missing controls, or the risk assessment doesn't look right - I hit Reject. This takes me to a rejection page where I have to write a reason. Something like 'Step 3 needs engineering controls for confined space entry, not just administrative.' I submit that, and the JSA goes back to Draft status. The creator gets notified, they can see the rejection reason, make fixes, and resubmit. This is the kind of audit trail operators love to see. Every approval, every rejection, every change is logged.

Once a JSA is approved, it doesn't just sit there. The supervisor hits Start Work to move it to 'In Progress' - this means boots are on the ground and the job is active. When the work is done, hit Complete. You get a dialog for completion notes - 'Job completed without incident, all isolations restored.' That closes out the JSA and records who completed it and when. So the full lifecycle is: Draft, Pending Approval, Approved, In Progress, Completed. Five clear stages, and every transition is tracked.

Let me show you what a completed JSA looks like. Everything is here on one page. At the top - status badge, job title, who created it and when. Risk scores for initial and residual risk. The info section shows scheduled date, location, and supervisor. The main content area has all your job steps in collapsible cards. Each step shows the risk reduction with a visual arrow - before score to after score. Hazards are in yellow badges, controls in green badges. You can expand any step to see the full details. On the right sidebar you've got: - Crew Members with attendance checkmarks - PPE Required list - Signatures with timestamps - Approval info - who approved, when, and any notes - Additional Notes And below the steps is the Activity feed - a timeline of every comment, status change, approval, and rejection. Anyone on the team can add comments here. It's your full paper trail.

Before I wrap up, let's talk about templates because they're a real time-saver. Your safety manager can create templates for any job your crews do regularly. Hot work, confined space, rig moves, pressure testing - set up the steps, the typical hazards, the standard controls, and default PPE once. Then when a field supervisor creates a new JSA, they pick the template from the dropdown, it loads everything in, and they just customize it for the specific site and conditions. Takes a five-minute job down to two minutes. And it standardizes quality. Every crew is starting from the same baseline, so you don't get one crew writing detailed JSAs and another crew writing two sentences per step.

So there you have it. Two ways to go digital with your JSAs. The free builder at basincheck.com/tools/jsa-builder is ready right now - no signup, no credit card. Go build a JSA, download the PDF, and see how it compares to what you're doing on paper. If you need the full platform - templates, approval workflows, crew tracking, audit trail - you can start a free trial from the same page. If you have questions, drop them in the comments. If this was helpful, hit subscribe - I'll be doing more walkthroughs of our safety compliance tools. Stay safe out there.