When the Person Who Knows Everything Leaves
In a small business one person usually holds the attendance system in their head. What to write down before that becomes a problem.
Tools
The most common attendance system in a small business is one person's knowledge, and its failure mode is a resignation.
What lives only in someone's head
How entitlement is calculated for the awkward part-timers.
Which balances were adjusted and why.
What was agreed with a particular person, informally, three years ago.
How the spreadsheet works: which cells are formulas, which are typed over.
Who to contact about the payroll side.
None of this is in the record, and all of it is needed the week after they go.
Writing it down
The calculation, for each non-standard pattern, with the working rather than the result.
Any individual arrangements, with the date and who agreed them.
A page on how the record itself works — where it is, who else has access, what is manual.
The annual cycle: when the leave year rolls, what happens then, what to check.
An afternoon, and it should exist before anyone gives notice.
Individual arrangements specifically
These are the most dangerous gap. Someone with an adjustment agreed verbally for a health condition, and the person who agreed it leaves.
The arrangement continues to have legal force whether or not anyone remembers it.
Write them down at the time, briefly, without the diagnosis.
Review them annually with the person, which is also a chance to check it still helps.
The second pair of eyes
One other person with read access, who has actually looked.
Better: someone who has run one period-end under supervision, which is the only way to find out what the written note left out.
In a business of fifteen this is the owner, and it is worth an hour of their time once a year.
What a product changes
It holds the calculation, which removes one category of knowledge from someone's head.
It does not hold the individual arrangements or the history of why, unless someone writes them in a note field.
So the handover problem shrinks but does not disappear, and the part that remains is the part with legal consequences.
The test
If the person who maintains attendance were unavailable for a month, could someone else run it?
In most small businesses the honest answer is no, and the fix is an afternoon of writing rather than a purchase.
Individual arrangements are the dangerous gap
Of everything held in one person's head, this is the part with legal consequences.
An adjustment agreed verbally for a health condition, and the person who agreed it leaves.
The arrangement continues to have force whether or not anyone remembers it.
Write them down at the time, briefly, with the date and without the diagnosis.
Review annually with the person, which also checks it still helps.
Check the difficult case
Use browse the integration directory to frame one representative test for this issue. The useful evidence is the record created when an employee corrects an entry, a manager reviews it and an administrator exports it.