How to prioritise compliance site visits across a large catchment

If your catchment runs to a few thousand licensed properties and your field team is three people for six weeks, you already know the arithmetic doesn't work. Driving every property on the register, in rotation, year after year, burns the budget on places that haven't changed since the last compliance cycle, while a new ring tank two valleys over sits unvisited for a season or more.

At that point, prioritisation decides whether the audit covers the ground that matters, rather than just the ground that's closest to the office.

Start from what's on the register, not what's on the road

Most catchment teams still plan routes the way you'd plan a mail run: cluster properties by road network, visit everyone in a loop, tick the box, move to the next loop. That's efficient for fuel and scheduling. It's useless for finding non-compliance, because it treats every licence holder as equally likely to be the problem.

A better starting point is the licence register itself, cross-checked against whatever evidence of change you can get your hands on, before anyone gets in a vehicle:

• Properties where the licensed volume looks low against the apparent size of storage infrastructure
• Takes near a river frontage where a header pipe or new pump shed wouldn't show up in a licence amendment
• Entitlement holders who haven't updated their works approval in years, on a catchment where everyone else has been expanding

None of that requires a site visit to establish. It requires a desk review that ranks risk, and most teams don't have the hours to do that review by eye across a few thousand properties using last year's aerial photo and this year's gut feeling.

Turning "might have changed" into a short list

What changes the arithmetic is a single annual pass over the catchment that flags storages and infrastructure not accounted for on the licence register, so the desk review has something concrete to rank instead of a hunch. We built a yearly satellite layer that sits candidate structures against the current register, which is exactly this: new farm dams, expanded storages, pumping infrastructure that never came through as a licence amendment, shown against what's actually on file for that property.

That doesn't replace the visit. It replaces the guesswork about which fifteen properties out of four hundred are worth the visit this year. A compliance officer can run the layer against the register in an afternoon and come out with a short list ordered by how far each site's apparent infrastructure sits from what the licence says.

What to do with the short list once you have it

Rank, don't just flag. A new storage on a property with a current, generous licence is lower priority than the same storage on a property whose entitlement was capped five years ago and never varied. Order the list by that gap, not by distance from the office.

Keep a column for "last physically inspected." A site that scored low on infrastructure risk but hasn't had eyes on it in six years earns a visit on schedule grounds alone, regardless of what the yearly pass shows.

Leave room on the list for the complaint-driven visits that come in through the year. A good prioritisation method doesn't pretend those won't happen; it just means they're not the only reason anyone drives out.

And treat the output as a starting point for the conversation, not a finding. A shed roof or a dry season reading can look like an unlicensed dam from above. The desk review tells the inspector where to go first and what question to ask on arrival, not what the outcome of the visit will be.

Run the register check before the next audit cycle starts, and the field team spends its six weeks on the properties most worth the fuel.