Hygiene checks for tattoo studios on a phone: Mitti

Your council registration comes with skin piercing byelaws that the council inspects against, but the cleaning sheet on the clipboard often gets filled in on a Friday from memory. In a studio with 3 artists, the owner spends about 40 minutes a week chasing blank boxes, checking sheets and filing them: about 172 minutes, 2.9 hours a month (40 × 4.3), and the gaps still show when the council inspects.

Mitti, until recently sold as SafetyCulture, is a checklist and inspection app for phones, tablets and the web, and works offline. Its pricing page lists a Free plan for up to 10 seats with 5 active inspection templates, basic tasks and issue reporting, and PDF and web reports. The same page lists AI features on the Free plan, using monthly AI credits (up to 300 a seat): creating and editing inspection templates, and reporting an issue from a photo or voice note. Turn your council's byelaws and your own procedures into checklists: opening checks, station set-up and clean-down between clients, end-of-day clean, a weekly deep clean, and a record of sharps bins and clinical waste collections. Artists tick each check at the station at the time, adding a photo where it helps. The app records what artists enter; the byelaws and your procedures set the standard, and the artists do the cleaning.

A registered studio in Leeds with 3 artists and an owner who also tattoos keeps paper cleaning sheets on a clipboard. They move the between-client, opening, closing, weekly and waste checks into Mitti, with a seat for each artist and the owner (4 of the 10 free seats).

About $72£54€64A$104C$102 a month in the owner's time, at no cost on Mitti's Free plan. That's 172 minus 43 minutes, about 129 minutes or 2.15 hours a month, at an assumed $33£25€30A$48C$47 an hour. The Free plan covers up to 10 seats and 5 active templates; Premium is $24 (about $24£18€21A$35C$34) a seat a month billed annually, or $29 (about $29£22€26A$42C$41) monthly, shown in dollars. Records ready for an inspection aren't priced.

1. 1Read your council's skin piercing byelaws and registration conditions, and list what they ask of the premises, equipment and cleaning, next to your own procedures and the product instructions you follow.
2. 2Build up to 5 templates in Mitti's Free plan from that list: opening, between clients, close, weekly deep clean, and sharps and clinical waste. If you let the AI draft a template, check every line against your list before anyone uses it.
3. 3Give each artist a seat and agree that the between-client check is done at the station straight after clean-down, not at the end of the day.
4. 4Make a failed item require a note of what was done about it, and use issue reporting for things like a full sharps bin or a broken soap dispenser.
5. 5Read the reports once a week, sort out anything that failed, and download PDF reports to your own records ahead of any inspection.

• The app records what people enter; it doesn't make a station clean. A ticked box with no clean-down behind it is worse than no record, so check stations yourself now and then.
• AI-drafted templates can include steps that aren't in your byelaws or miss ones that are. The council's byelaws and conditions decide what applies, so check with the licensing team if unsure.
• The Free plan stops at 10 seats and 5 active templates, and its dashboard only shows 30 days of data. Download reports regularly rather than relying on the app as your only copy.
• In London, outside the City of London, studios need a special treatment license from the borough instead of registration, so the conditions to build the checklists from are different.