Our manager left and nobody knows where the compliance records are

This is the single most common way a compliance history disappears, and it has nothing to do with carelessness. Reports arrive as email attachments addressed to whoever books the work. That person leaves, their mailbox is closed or nobody thinks to search it, and several years of records leave with them.

Reconstructing, in the order that works

1. Start with the bank or card statements, not with memory. Twelve to twenty-four months of statements will name every vendor who was paid. This is the only complete list you have and it is authoritative in a way nobody's recollection is.
2. Call each vendor and ask for their full history for your address. Ask for PDFs by email. Most keep records and most will send them, because you are still a customer and it costs them a few minutes.
3. Check the departed manager's mailbox if it still exists. Search for the vendor names from step one rather than for words like "certificate", because the subject lines are usually the vendor's own reference numbers.
4. Ask the landlord for anything they hold, particularly sprinkler and alarm, which are frequently theirs.
5. Check whether your jurisdiction runs a third party reporting programme. If it does, the fire department may hold filed copies of some reports. See how those programmes work.

What to do about the gaps you cannot close

Some will not close. A vendor has gone out of business, or the technician who did the work left and took the paperwork practice with them. Write down what is missing and why, with the date you looked.

That note has real value. A documented gap with an explanation and a date is a materially better position than an unexplained absence, because it demonstrates the gap was identified and addressed rather than ignored. Then get the current cycle serviced so that there is a clean, current record from a known date.

The actual fix

Reconstruction is the symptom. The cause is that the destination for records was a person rather than the business. Any of these fixes it, and the specific choice matters far less than making one:

• A shared mailbox that does not belong to an individual.
• A dedicated address for reports that survives staff changes.
• Anywhere that is not the personal inbox of whoever currently books the work.

Then tell every vendor once. Most will update their template and it will never need mentioning again.

Add it to offboarding

When any manager leaves, the handover should include which vendors they booked, where reports were arriving, and any service due in the next ninety days. That is three lines and it prevents this entire situation.