What clause 4.2 requires
The written reliability decision must be prepared by, or under the supervision of, an appropriately qualified and named surveyor who accepts responsibility for the output’s use. Two things follow from that wording, and both are often got wrong.Supervision is expressly allowed
The decision does not have to be typed by the named surveyor. It can be prepared by someone else under their supervision. A graduate or an assistant drafting the assessment, with a qualified surveyor directing and reviewing it, is a route the standard permits.What it cannot be is a name added to work nobody senior actually engaged with. Supervision means the named surveyor has applied their own judgement to the reliability question and stands behind the conclusion.
'Appropriately qualified' is your firm's judgement
The standard does not list designations, and neither does guardbook. It asks whether the named surveyor is appropriately qualified for the output in question, which depends on the work.Set the answer in your firm’s AI policy rather than case by case. Who may be named, for which kinds of output, is exactly the sort of thing clause 3.2 expects a policy to make clear.
How guardbook records it
The Surveyor field at the top of the form is a picker, populated from the people recorded against your firm. It is not free text, so the name on an entry always resolves to a person on your record. If the person you need is not in the list, add them to your People record first. The picker will be empty and the form disabled until at least one person exists. Separately, guardbook records who was signed in when the entry was created. That is written to your firm’s audit trail alongside the entry. So where a decision was prepared under supervision, the record naturally shows both: the surveyor who takes responsibility, and the account that entered it.What guardbook does not do
The control here is procedural, not technical. Anyone who can sign in to your firm’s account can record an entry and name any person on your firm’s record as the surveyor. If that matters to you, and in most firms it should, say so in your AI policy and make sure the people who use the log know the rule.A useful test before saving: if this entry were read back to the named surveyor in a RICS review, would they recognise the reasoning as theirs? If not, the entry needs their input before it is filed, not after.