A solver does not know where your building is. It will happily produce a beautiful assessment of a tower in Dubai against English guidance, and nothing in the output will mention that the guidance does not govern there. That is a document somebody signs.
The criteria this system assesses against — tenability limits, smoke layer heights, the guidance documents cited in the basis of design — are not universal physics. They are the product of a specific regulatory framework. Applied outside it, they are someone else's rules quoted with confidence at a building they have no authority over.
So the jurisdiction is declared as part of the model, and a check runs before anything else that reads on it. If the guidance cited does not govern where the building is, nothing below that finding matters, and the register says so at the top rather than in a footnote.
The most expensive kind of wrong document is the one that is internally perfect and answers the wrong question.
An unsupported jurisdiction is not a gap we are hiding. It is an entry in the system that names itself and explains what would have to be true for it to change.
| Jurisdiction | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| England | Supported | The framework the system was built and validated against. |
| Wales | Supported | Assessed on its own guidance rather than treated as England. |
| Scotland | Supported | A separate framework, handled as one. |
| Northern Ireland | Supported | Supported in its own right. |
| Republic of Ireland | Supported | Supported in its own right. |
| United Arab Emirates | Refused | Each carries a written reason for refusal in the system itself. The physics transfers; the acceptance criteria and the guidance the document must cite do not. We would rather decline the work than issue an assessment whose criteria have no standing where the building is. |
| Qatar | Refused | |
| Hong Kong | Refused | |
| United States | Refused |
If you need one of the refused jurisdictions, that is a conversation worth having rather than a door closed. Adding one properly means sourcing the governing framework, encoding its criteria and validating against a real study from that market — it is work, not a configuration flag, and we will say so plainly rather than take the project and improvise.
This is the same instinct that runs through the pressure check, the conformance reconciliation and the opening-area limits. The system is built on the assumption that the output will be relied upon by somebody who was not in the room when it was produced — a building control officer, an approver, a coroner.
Under that assumption, a document that overstates its own applicability is not a minor presentational issue. It is the whole liability.
The practical effect is that Ashbeck occasionally tells a paying customer that it cannot do what they asked. We have decided that is the correct behaviour and priced accordingly, rather than building a system that says yes and hopes.
It is the fastest qualifying question in the whole conversation, and it saves both sides a great deal of time when the answer is no.