Keep a credential current

A CPR certificate is due to expire in ninety days. Delaware requires qualified coverage at every site, and an OCCL inspector will ask to see it. This flow crosses Staff, Compliance and Notifications, and it has the shortest automated half of anything anywhere in PTRS: something detects the approaching expiry every single night, and nothing tells anyone.

The consequence is a practical one, not a philosophical one. If you are waiting for PTRS to warn you, you will find out only once the certificate has already lapsed.

The flow at a glance

#	Step	Part of PTRS	Documented in
1	The credential is on the personnel record with an expiry date	Staff	Record a credential
2	A nightly job detects it approaching expiry	Staff	What happens automatically
3	An alert is produced and reaches nobody	Staff, Notifications	What happens automatically
4	Somebody opens a screen and actually sees it	Staff, Compliance	Work the staff directory
5	The renewal is recorded, and verified	Staff	Record a credential
6	Coverage is shown to an inspector	Compliance, Centers	Prepare for an OCCL inspection

A staff member is not the same as a person who can sign in

This flow runs on personnel records: the personnel file, the credentials, the ratio count. Being able to sign in to PTRS is a separate record entirely, created through a separate action, and nothing in PTRS actually connects the two. A person can have a credential tracked here with no way to sign in at all, or a way to sign in with no personnel record behind it. See how a person becomes a PTRS user and step 5 of open a new organisation.

Step 1: recording the credential

Credentials, their types, their expiry dates and the verification record are on Record a credential, with every field and the rule PTRS enforces on it at Staff fields. Background checks follow their own separate path; see run a background check. Training records are tracked separately again, at track training compliance.

A credential saved with no expiry date is invisible to everything described below. No background job selects it, and no tracker screen counts it.

Steps 2 and 3: detected, then dropped

Three separate nightly jobs read this same data. Their actual schedules, in Delaware's own time zone, and exactly what each one writes, are at what happens automatically.

Job	Delaware time	Alert windows
Credential expiry check	Between one and two in the morning	90, 60 and 30 days out
Background check expiry	Between one and two in the morning	180, 90 and 30 days out
Training compliance check	Between two and three in the morning	30 or 60 days, depending on the rule

No staff alert has ever actually left PTRS's own equipment

No mail server address is set in any configuration file anywhere in this project, so the message-sending PTRS actually uses, in development, production and cloud staging alike, only ever writes a log line rather than sending anything.

Setting up a real mail server on its own would still not be enough: PTRS's own real mail-sending code checks that same setting and quietly returns without sending whenever it is blank. The mail server address is the actual switch here, not which mail-sending code is registered.

A credential expiring tomorrow produces one line in a server log at one in the morning, and nothing else at all. See every staff email in PTRS is a log line.

Three further details matter for planning around this, and all three come from that same page.

Every alert is addressed to the staff member whose own record it concerns, never to their site director. The one method that would reach a supervisor instead has nothing calling it anywhere.

A night the job does not run is a threshold missed for good. The credential job only looks at a narrow window around each threshold, with no way of catching up afterward.

Eleven of the fifteen mandatory trainings raise nothing at all when they expire, because only four of the fifteen actually have a rule behind them. See the training compliance check.

Nothing reaches a screen either. These jobs send their own live events under names nothing on any screen actually listens for, so the Staff Notifications bell reads "No notifications yet" permanently, no matter what has actually expired.

Do not use the audit trail to check whether a job actually ran

Nothing a scheduled job does is written to the audit trail at all; the audit trail only records changes made by a signed-in person through PTRS itself. See the audit hash chain.

Step 4: the screens that actually work

Because step 3 delivers nothing at all, this flow only continues once a person opens a screen themselves. These are the ones that read the same figures on demand, and they genuinely work.

To see	Open
Credentials expiring soon	Staff, the Expiring Credentials tile and the Expiring Soon filter. See work the staff directory
Background-check status and expiry	Staff, Pending BG Checks, then that staff member's own Background Checks tab. See run a background check
Training expiry and gaps	Track training compliance
Personnel-file completeness	Build a personnel file
Credential coverage across a site	Read the Compliance Radar

Set a recurring calendar reminder to open these yourself. That is the honest workaround, and it is what PTRS actually supports today.

Notice that three different "expiring soon" windows are used across different screens in this module; they are listed at Staff fields. Two screens can genuinely disagree about whether the same credential is expiring soon.

Step 5: recording the renewal

Add or update the credential with its new expiry date, and record the verification, on record a credential.

Nothing renews anything on its own. No credential, training record or personnel document is ever extended automatically by PTRS, and no renewal task is ever created for you. Equally, nothing deactivates anybody either: an expired background check does not change a staff member's active status, remove them from a shift, or take them out of the ratio count.

The start-work check is a display, not an actual control

Delaware's central child-safety rule, no contact with children until fingerprinting is documented, is worked out and shown on screen, and nothing anywhere actually checks it before a shift is created, before a check-in, or before someone is assigned to a room.

A staff member with a denied background check can be scheduled and counted toward the staff-to-child ratio, while the onboarding board is still showing a red "Cannot Start Work" banner for them. Read the board yourself before putting someone on a shift, because the schedule will never read it for you. See nothing enforces this check.

There is one genuine automatic connection in this whole module worth knowing about, because it can change an onboarding board with nobody touching it: when a background check moves to cleared, PTRS automatically completes the matching clearance task on that staff member's own onboarding record, attributed to PTRS itself rather than a person. See the one thing that does connect.

Step 6: what an inspector is actually shown

Prepare for an OCCL inspection is a printable checklist built from PTRS's own eight compliance rules and the licence record, with the exact screen to check each item on. It is where this whole flow ends, and it is printable deliberately, because an inspection can happen somewhere with no connection at all.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it.

The credential-currency rule is correctly written and registered, and produces nothing today. The calculation it runs inside of fails outright on every single evaluation before it can write anything, so no compliance score and no compliance alert exists from it at all. The checklist reads the underlying records directly instead, which is why it still actually works. See how the compliance score is calculated.

The site's own licence is a separate expiry with its own separate job, and it has exactly the same delivery problem. See what happens automatically and record an OCCL licence.

What this flow guarantees, and what it does not

The credential record, its expiry and its verification	Recorded, reliably
Detection of an approaching expiry	Happens, nightly, in the small hours
Anyone actually being told	No. Not by email, not on a screen, not through the bell
A lapsed credential blocking a shift or the ratio count	No. Nothing is actually enforced
A printable coverage record for an inspector	Yes, the checklist, read straight from the records

Related

• Staff overview, Compliance overview, Notifications
• Who can do what in Staff
• Work an onboarding workflow
• Report an incident, the other flow that also ends at OCCL