What happens automatically

Tom would like to sleep at night knowing that if Denise's CPR card is about to expire, PTRS will tell him. Five times a night, PTRS does look. This page says what each check does, when it runs by Delaware time, and who receives what it finds. The short answer to that last question is nobody, and the rest of this page is the evidence.

The five checks and when they really run

PTRS's clock runs on universal time (UTC). Delaware is five hours behind in winter and four in summer. The checks are described inside PTRS as running "daily at 6 AM", "7 AM" and so on, which is right by PTRS's clock and misleading by yours.

Check	Delaware time, winter and summer
Credential expiry	1 am, 2 am
Background check expiry	1 am, 2 am
Training compliance	2 am, 3 am
Overdue onboarding	3 am, 4 am
Personnel file	4 am, 5 am

All five run in the small hours, hours before anyone opens PTRS. That would not matter if what they found reached an inbox. It does not, so it matters twice: the work happens when nobody is looking, and it produces nothing to look at afterwards.

Every staff email in PTRS is a log line

This one fact governs four of the five checks, so it comes first.

Before any email can leave PTRS, PTRS has to be given the address of a mail server. No version of PTRS that can be installed today has one. Without it, PTRS uses a stand-in that writes what it would have sent into its own log and stops. A credential expiring tomorrow produces one line in that log at one in the morning, and nothing else.

No staff alert has ever left PTRS

Every alert in Staff, about credential expiry, background check expiry, training expiry, a background check changing status, or an overdue onboarding task, becomes a log line. The right way to think about it is not "email is unreliable" but "there is no email".

One more thing about who the messages are addressed to, which is a design choice rather than a defect. Every one of them is addressed to the staff member whose record it concerns, at their own email address. A credential expiry alert would go to the person whose credential is expiring, not to their site director. The one message PTRS could send to a site director, saying a staff member "can now start working with children", is never attempted at all.

Check by check

Credential expiry

Two passes. First, for each of 90, 60 and 30 days from now, PTRS finds credentials expiring within a day either side of that date and writes a log line for each, addressed to the staff member. The one-day tolerance means a credential can be logged on two nights running at the same threshold, and it means a night the check does not run is a threshold missed for good; there is no catch-up.

Second, PTRS finds credentials that expired yesterday and makes a note that reaches no screen. The same one-night window applies, and it is stricter: a credential that expired while PTRS was down is never noticed at all.

This check ignores removed credentials

The check does not skip credentials you have removed, so a removed credential keeps producing a log line every night until its expiry date passes.

Background check expiry

Windows of 180, 90 and 30 days before expiry, with the same one-day tolerance and the same missed-night behaviour. It looks only at clearances that are fully cleared or Rap Back enrolled, which is right, because those are the two states that carry a five-year expiry. It writes its log line worded as a credential expiry. It changes nothing on the record.

Training compliance

Three passes, over four trainings only, not the fifteen mandatory ones:

Training	Alerted from
CPR Certification	30 days before expiry
First Aid Certification	30 days
CACFP Program Training	60 days
Mandatory Reporter Training	60 days

First, records for those four expiring between now and the threshold get a log line addressed to the staff member. Unlike the credential check this window is cumulative, so the same person is logged every night for the last 30 or 60 days of the certificate's life.

Second, records that expired yesterday get a note that reaches no screen.

Third, active staff with no current record for a mandatory training are counted and written to the log as a warning. No email, no note, nothing on the record. A person who has never done Mandatory Reporter Training produces one line in a log at three in the morning.

Three things follow. Eleven of the fifteen mandatory trainings, everything except the four above, raise nothing at all when they expire. Each of the four rules names who should be told, "Notify Site Director and HR" and so on, and nothing reads that. And a training record saved with no expiry date is invisible to all three passes.

Overdue onboarding

PTRS finds onboarding tasks that are incomplete, past their due date, on a workflow still in progress, and not already marked as notified. For each it writes a log line addressed to the staff member, makes a note that reaches no screen, and then does something the other checks do not: it marks the task as notified.

A mark that records a notification nobody received

That mark is how the check avoids processing a task twice, so each overdue task is handled exactly once, ever, and nothing can clear the mark. Two consequences. The record now says a person was told about an overdue task when nobody was. And if email is ever switched on, every task already marked will never be alerted, because the mark is already set. Whoever switches email on has to clear those marks in the same change or the backlog is lost silently.

Five of the eight background check tasks and one credentialing task have no due date at all, so this check can never see them however long they sit.

Personnel file

The one check with no email at all. For every active staff member, PTRS counts missing and expired personnel documents against the eleven requirements and, for each person with at least one of either, makes a note that reaches no screen. It changes nothing on the record, sends nothing, and creates no compliance alert.

Note how it counts. A document counts as missing when there is none, and as expired when its expiry date has passed. Every document you record is pending, and pending is neither, so this check treats an unverified document as satisfying the requirement. That matches the Audit Readiness screen and contradicts the person's own personnel file, which shows the same document as Missing. See Build a personnel file.

What the notes reach

When one of these checks, or a change to a credential, shift, onboarding task or background check, makes a note, PTRS writes a log line and sends a message to every open PTRS screen, under one of thirteen names. The compliance screens in PTRS listen for eight names. Not one of the thirteen matches any of the eight.

Not one message name matches what any screen listens for

PTRS sends "credential expired"; the screen listens for "credential expiry event". PTRS sends "background check status changed"; the screen listens for "background check update event". There is no overlap at all. Of the eight names the screens listen for, four are sent by nothing anywhere in PTRS, and three are sent only by the compliance score, which fails before it reaches the sending step. The eighth is sent by nothing that is ever asked to.

What that means for you: the Staff Notifications bell on the Staff page reads "No notifications yet" permanently, the pop-up messages such as "Onboarding gate cleared, staff can start work!" never appear, and a change made in another browser tab is not reflected until you refresh.

The messages are sent to everyone, in every organisation

Every one of these messages goes to every open PTRS screen in every organisation, not just yours, and each one carries staff names, credential types and background check statuses. No PTRS screen shows them, because of the name mismatch above, but they are sent regardless, and a screen that listened by the right names would receive another organisation's staff data. This is recorded for the PTRS team as a live exposure. The one message that is sent only to the right site is the ratio update after a shift change, and nothing listens for that either.

The one thing that does connect

When a background check is recorded as Fully Cleared (Pre-Rap Back) or CHU Approved, PTRS looks for that person's in-progress onboarding workflow, finds the Background Check track, and ticks the first incomplete task whose name contains "clearance", under the name "system". It then re-checks the track and the workflow, which can complete the track and change the banner. In the standard task set exactly one task matches: CHU clearance decision.

This is a real, working link between two parts of Staff, and it is worth knowing about because an onboarding board will change without anybody touching it. It is also the only one. Nothing else in Staff reacts to anything else.

Nothing enforces a gate

PTRS works out, in two places, Delaware's central child safety rule: a person may not have contact with children until fingerprinting is documented. The background check's answer is "fingerprints documented, and the check is not denied, prohibited or revoked". The onboarding workflow's answer is "a completed task whose name contains fingerprint, and at least one completed required training task".

Neither answer blocks anything

Both answers are shown on screen and read by nothing else. Nothing checks either before creating a shift, checking a child in, assigning a room, or counting a person in the staff-to-child ratio. A staff member with a denied background check can be scheduled, put in a room, and counted. The onboarding board will show Cannot Start Work in red while the scheduling page accepts them without comment.

The onboarding answer is also weaker than it reads. "Minimum required training is complete" is satisfied by one completed required task out of the Training track's six. And the "cleared to start" message fires again on every later task completion once the condition is met, because PTRS forgets that it already sent it. Nothing receives it, so nobody sees the repeats today.

For anyone running a site: the banner is a display, not a control. Read the onboarding board before you put someone on a shift, because the schedule will not read it for you.

Which of these would reach Tom?

Denise's CPR card expires in 30 days. Tonight's credential check finds it.

It writes one line in PTRS's log, addressed to Denise, not Tom. No email leaves PTRS. Tom finds out when he opens Staff and reads the Expiring Credentials figure, or when the card has expired.

Denise's CHU clearance is recorded as approved.

PTRS ticks "CHU clearance decision" on her onboarding board by itself. That is the only thing on this page that changes a record. Tom still hears nothing.

What Staff does not do on its own

• It renews nothing. No credential, training record or personnel document is ever extended, and no renewal task is created.
• It deactivates nobody. An expired background check does not change the person's active status, remove them from shifts, or take them out of the directory.
• It writes no compliance alert. Those come from the compliance score, which fails on every run. See How ratio compliance is measured.
• It creates no notification. See Notifications.
• It does not talk to DEEDS. The DEEDS connection in PTRS is a placeholder that nothing ever calls.

What to do instead

Until a message can leave PTRS, the nightly checks are worth exactly the screens that read the same data on demand, and those work.

Instead of waiting for	Open
A credential expiry alert	Staff, the Expiring Credentials figure and the Expiring Soon filter, remembering the three different windows
A background check renewal notice	Staff, the Pending BG Checks figure, then each person's Background Checks tab for the expiry date
A training expiry alert	Training Compliance
An overdue onboarding alert	Active Onboardings, which shows an overdue count per workflow
A personnel file warning	Audit Readiness

Put a repeating reminder in your calendar to open them. That is the honest workaround, and it is what PTRS supports today.

Related

• Staff, the full list of what is not wired up
• Who can do what in Staff
• Staff fields and limits
• Notifications, why nothing is ever sent
• Staff troubleshooting