Can SDS Manager create a risk assessment for our chemicals?

You can build one — but we won't hand you a generic template, and here's why: risk isn't generic. A splash of gasoline in a small container is a very different risk than 1,000 gallons of it in storage. If a universal risk assessment were possible, it would already be sitting inside the Safety Data Sheet.

Instead, the Risk Assessment tool — included from the Premium plan once your library reaches 5 SDSs, and with no threshold on Pro/Enterprise — walks you through the variables that actually matter, in three steps.

1 Describe your usage

Pick the product from your library and the assessment opens against its actual SDS — inherent hazard codes (H5/S3/E3-style badges) are pulled in automatically from the sheet, not typed in by hand. You then describe how your site actually uses it: what it's used for, how, its physical form, who's exposed, how often, in what amount, and whether a safer substitute has been considered.

Once the usage fields are filled in, AI Suggest 1 becomes available — it proposes a hazard assessment from what you've described, rather than making you rate every category cold. Persons at risk 2 and the other usage fields feed directly into the scoring in Step 2.

• 1 AI Suggest — proposes ratings from your usage description
• 2 Persons at risk — who's actually exposed

The same section also surfaces the location's storage risk (safety and environmental, both auto-rated as Dangerous/Warning/etc. from the substance's classification) and the SDS's own disposal, storage, and precaution text — pulled straight from the sheet so you're not re-typing it.

2 Rate each hazard type

SDS Manager doesn't ask you to rate the substance as one lump risk. It reads the hazard statements straight off the SDS and opens a separate card for every hazard type they imply — in a Benzene SDS, for example, that's Corrosive, Eyes, Skin, Ingestion/Oral, Flammable, Radiation, Environment, and Inhalation/Respiration, each one showing exactly which H-statement triggered it.

For each card you rate inherent health hazard 1 (1 – No Hazard through 5 – Extremely Hazardous/Deadly) and inherent likelihood/exposure without controls on the same 1–5 scale. Add the PPE or controls actually in place 2 — eye protection, gloves, ventilation, whatever applies — and only then can you rate how much those controls reduce the exposure.

• 1 Inherent health hazard rating (1–5)
• 2 Protection and controls in place for this hazard

3 Get your risk rating and PPE

As hazard cards are rated, the summary panel at the top of the assessment rolls them up into a single Health / Safety / Environmental risk rating — both without controls and with controls in place — plus a separate storage risk rating and the combined PPE/Controls 1 icon set for the whole assessment, not just one hazard.

• 1 PPE/Controls — combined from every rated hazard type

Each score runs Health, Safety, and Environmental risk from 1–5, both with and without controls in place. Once the assessment is approved, those controls automatically appear on secondary container labels and on the printable job procedure sheet (see the next question) as a scannable QR code.

There's no separate "download" or "export" button for a risk evaluation, but you can save one as a PDF: open the chemical instruction & risk assessment page and click the Print icon at the top — this opens your browser's print dialog, where choosing "Save as PDF" as the destination gives you a PDF copy instead of a physical printout.