# BESS-5 Tool Notes
Welcome to BESS, a sustainable design assessment tool for buildings at the planning permit stage.
BESS supports the ‘Sustainable Design Assessment in the Planning Process’ framework and the Environmentally Sustainable Design (ESD) Local Planning Policies. BESS assesses projects against a benchmark in nine environmental categories.
In many Victorian councils, planning permit applicants are asked to submit information about how the proposed development addresses sustainability, either as:
- a Sustainable Design Assessment (SDA), for small scale developments, or
- a Sustainability Management Plan (SMP), for large scale developments
A BESS report can be used to support these submissions.
The triggers for an SDA or SMP, and the definition of small and large scale, is set by individual councils based on the local development context. Check your relevant council's website.
The BESS interface is dynamic – the questions you are asked and the information you must provide are tailored to the size and type of your development.
This means that your experience using BESS will be quite different if you are using it to assess a single home or renovation compared with a large mixed-use development (such as an apartment complex with retail and office space).
We recommend that BESS is used in Chrome or Firefox.