Questions

The ones worth answering honestly, including the ones where the answer is not flattering.

Do I actually need an IIPP?

If you have employees in California, yes. Title 8 CCR §3203(a) opens “Every employer shall establish, implement and maintain an effective Injury and Illness Prevention Program.” There is no employee-count floor and no exemption for small businesses, offices, or people who work from home.

Isn’t a free template enough?

Cal/OSHA publishes a free model program, and for some employers it is genuinely enough. A template is a blank: you decide which parts describe your work, fill them in, and keep the result up to date yourself.

What this does instead is ask about your work and generate the documents in our catalogue that your answers call for, each citing the section it comes from so you can check it. Your answers and every version are kept, so a change is an edit rather than a fresh start.

What do I actually get?

Each program as its own document with its own version and review date, the whole thing as one read-through file for whoever runs the program, a short Employee Safety Handbook to hand every worker, a compliance calendar listing the recurring duties your programs create, each with its interval and its authority, and blank record forms. That is Starter; the silica and respiratory protection plans are in Pro, and the $99 single document is the IIPP alone. Both sample programs are published at full length, if you would rather read one than read about one. The forms matter more than they look: Cal/OSHA judges a program partly on whether employees know it exists and whether it was communicated to them, and those are things you prove with records rather than with prose.

Is this legal advice?

No. It is a document generator. Each section cites the Title 8 standard it comes from, so you can open the regulation at dir.ca.gov and check it yourself — but that is a way to verify, not advice, and it is not a substitute for a safety professional or an attorney who knows your workplace.

Has a safety professional reviewed this?

The current generated output has not received a comprehensive professional review, and nothing here is certified, approved or endorsed by a safety professional or an attorney. Where that matters most the documents say so themselves: the silica and respiratory protection plans carry the highest cost of being wrong, so each prints a notice of its review status on its own face. That review has not been completed. Until it is, those plans are generated and marked rather than quietly sold as reviewed — and every requirement in them is cited to the subsection of Title 8 it comes from, which is what makes a wrong answer findable.

Can I edit what it produces?

Yes — they are ordinary Word documents. Editing them here creates a new version rather than overwriting the old one, so the history of what changed and when survives, which is the part an inspector asks about.

What happens when the regulations change?

Nothing happens by itself, and it is worth being plain about that. When we revise a chapter — because a standard changed, or because we found something to correct — every saved program built from the older text shows a “Template update” flag on your records page, with a button that regenerates it as a new version. You press it; we do not regenerate your documents for you, and we do not email you about the change. That works the same on every tier. Revising a chapter is something a person here does by reading the standard, not an automatic feed.

Each plan carries its own version and its own next-review date, and the manual’s front page lists them. A plan past its review date is shaded and marked overdue rather than quietly listed — a manual that hides its own staleness is worth less than one that admits it.

Do you cover construction? Food?

Both. Construction work brings the Construction Safety Orders with it, including a Code of Safe Practices and tailgate meetings at least every ten working days, and the silica plan for construction is a different standard from the one for a fixed facility. Food businesses get kitchen and food production content in their Code of Safe Practices.

Food handler cards are a separate matter: that is the California Retail Food Code, enforced by county environmental health, not Cal/OSHA. There is a free determination tool for it, kept deliberately outside the safety program so the two are not confused.

Can you write the silica plan for my business?

We generate the 8 CCR §5204 exposure control plan from the silica tasks you list for your own shop or facility, and it is written around high-exposure trigger tasks — cutting, grinding, polishing and similar work on stone and other silica-containing products, and cleaning up after it. We do not generate it for abrasive blasting; for quarries, mines, or concrete or cement manufacturing; for fired ceramic or porcelain tile manufacturing; for natural stone monument and memorial work; or for geologic field research. If your answers describe one of those, we will tell you before you pay and will not sell you Starter or Pro for that program. A single IIPP can be bought for it only as a limited purchase: one IIPP, with no silica exposure control plan, which is not a complete safety-program package for that work. Where the plan requires a procedure that only you can describe — putting on and taking off protective equipment, how training and medical surveillance are arranged — it gives you the requirement and a box to complete. It is labelled a draft, and it is not finished until you complete them. A purchase is checked against the programs on your account when you buy. If you later add a program, or change the answers of one, so that it describes silica work we do not generate the plan for, its download page will say what that download leaves out, and you may be asked to acknowledge it before you take the file for the first time. Construction silica work is a different standard, 8 CCR §1532.3, and has its own plan built from Table 1.

What about the free silica screener?

It is genuinely free and needs no account. It works out whether §5204 reaches your work and which of your tasks are high-exposure trigger tasks. Nothing you enter is stored.

Refunds?

Each payment is refundable in full for 7 days, as long as you have not downloaded an editable file under that purchase since. The watermarked preview never counts. See the refund policy for what counts as downloading and why the rule works that way.

Something else

Ask. If the answer is that the tool does not do something, you will be told that rather than sold something adjacent.

Not legal advice.