Bēcon ← Bēcon Point Labs
Worked example · Automation

The work that is nobody's job.

Insurance, licenses, certifications, inspections and contracts all expire. In most organizations there is no list, no owner and no warning. The lapse is discovered at the exact moment the thing needed to be valid.


Part one

A register that knows what today is.

Ten obligations belonging to a fictional twenty person contractor. The business is invented. Every date below is calculated from the real date on your device right now, so what you are looking at is arithmetic, not a screenshot.

0already lapsed
0need action inside 14 days
0notices going out this week
0dated obligations tracked

Two of these have a deadline that is not the date printed on them. Switch the sort.

ObligationOwnerDate on documentAct byStatus

Select any row for its notice schedule and what a lapse actually costs.


Part two

What goes out in the next seven days.

This is the whole output of the system. Not a dashboard somebody has to remember to open. A handful of messages, to a named person, on a day that leaves time to act. Notice how much of the traffic comes from the one item nobody has closed.

    What this demo is, honestly

    The contractor, the ten obligations and the four names are invented. Everything computed from them is not. The dates, the day counts, the notice schedule and the status of each item are all worked out from your device clock when this page loaded, which is why the register looks different depending on when you open it.

    This is the least clever thing on this site. There is no model in it and no judgment being made. It is a list, a set of dates, and a rule about who gets told and when. We include it because in our experience it returns more than most of the sophisticated work, and because a lab that only shows you its impressive projects is not being straight with you.

    It is also worth saying plainly: for a small organization with fifteen or twenty obligations, a spreadsheet and a calendar will do most of this. If that is your situation we will tell you so rather than build you something. The case for building starts when the list crosses a few dozen items, when the obligations sit in several systems that do not talk, or when who owns each one genuinely changes.


    The part people miss

    The deadline is often not the date on the certificate.

    An insurance policy is simple. It expires on the day it says it expires, and you have until then.

    A contract with an automatic renewal is not simple. It renews on a date, but it requires notice before that date, and the notice period is the real deadline. The software contract in the register above renews in four months and needs sixty days notice, so the day you actually lose the choice is two months earlier than the date anybody has in their head. The commercial lease is worse. Its break clause needs nine months of notice, which means the only opportunity to leave or renegotiate closes while the renewal still looks like a problem for next year.

    This is the single most common way a register gets built wrong. Somebody makes a spreadsheet, types in the dates from the documents, sets reminders, and still gets locked into the contract, because the reminder fired after the window had already shut. A register that is worth having stores two dates for every obligation and sorts on the second one.

    1. 01
      One list, with an owner on every line Not a department and not a shared inbox. A person, by name, who is answerable for that item. Most of the value of this work is in the afternoon it takes to build the list, before any software exists.
    2. 02
      Two dates per obligation The date on the document, and the date action has to start. For anything with a notice period, cancellation window or lead time on the paperwork, those are different, and the second one governs.
    3. 03
      A notice ladder, not a single reminder Ninety days, thirty, fourteen, seven, then the day itself, escalating to a second person as it gets closer. One reminder is a reminder you can miss on a bad week.
    4. 04
      Somewhere the notices land that is not email alone Email is where reminders go to be archived unread. The last two rungs of the ladder should reach somebody by a route they cannot triage away.
    5. 05
      A way to mark it done that closes the loop When the renewal is completed the next date is set automatically, and until somebody confirms it, the escalation keeps running. An item that nobody closes should get louder, not quieter.

    How many dated obligations does your organization have?

    Most owners guess low by half, and cannot name who owns each one. The count itself is usually the useful part of this conversation.

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