Record a background check

Denise's fingerprint appointment is booked for Thursday, and the CHU decision will come a few weeks after. You want her record to show where the clearance stands at every step. This page is how to record a Delaware background check from start to its five-year expiry, on the Background Checks tab.

Who can do this

• Front-line staff
• Site director
• Regional director
• Organisation admin
• Super admin

There is no separation of duties here. A front-line staff member can advance their own background check to Fully Cleared.

PTRS records this process. It does not perform it.

Nothing here sends anything to the ECE portal, the SBI, the FBI, the child protection registry, the sex offender registry or DSCYF's Child-Care Home Unit. Every status change is a person typing what already happened somewhere else. The record is only as accurate as whoever last updated it, and PTRS cannot tell when it is out of date.

What you need

The staff record must exist. A person can have only one open check at a time. Starting a second while one is open is refused.

Know which kind you are recording:

Kind	For
Initial Background Check	A new hire's first clearance
Renewal (5-year)	The five-year re-check
Out-of-State Transfer	Someone transferring in with a clearance from elsewhere

A fourth kind, a check opened in response to a Rap Back alert, exists in PTRS and is not offered by the dialog. The kind is stored and shown. All four follow exactly the same steps.

Start the check

1. Open the staff member, then the Background Checks tab.

2. Press the button to start a check. The dialog is headed Initiate Background Check, subtitled "Start a new background check process per 31 Del.C. section 309. The check will begin at ECE Portal Submission."

   It does not. The check starts one step earlier, at Not Started, and submitting to the ECE portal is the first step you record yourself.

3. Choose the kind under Check Type and submit. A message reads "Background check initiated".

Checkpoint

A card appears reading the kind of check, "Initiated" and today's date, with a status badge of Not Started. The Pending BG Checks figure on the Staff page has gone up by one.

Advance it, one step at a time

1. Press Update Status on the card. The dialog is Update Background Check Status, subtitled "Advance the background check to the next stage."
2. The New Status list offers only the steps allowed from where the check is now. Choose one, add notes if you like, and submit. A message reads "Background check status updated".
3. Repeat as each real step happens.

The full sequence, in order:

1. Not Started
2. ECE Portal Submitted
3. Fingerprint Scheduled
4. Fingerprint Completed. From here, PTRS considers the person allowed to have contact with children.
5. SBI Check Pending, then SBI Cleared or SBI Flagged
6. FBI Check Pending, then FBI Cleared or FBI Flagged
7. Child Protection Pending, then Cleared or Flagged
8. Sex Offender Check Pending, then Cleared or Flagged
9. Fully Cleared (Pre-Rap Back)

Any flagged result goes to CHU Review Pending, and from there to CHU Approved, which counts as fully cleared, or CHU Denied, which is the end.

From Fully Cleared, the check can go to Rap Back Enrolled. A Rap Back Alert sends it to CHU Review Pending, back to Rap Back Enrolled, or to Revoked, which is the end.

Checkpoint

After Fingerprint Completed, the card shows today as the fingerprint date and PTRS marks the person as able to start work.

After Fully Cleared (Pre-Rap Back) or CHU Approved, the card shows today as the clearance date and an expiry date five years later.

Every date is the date you pressed the button

PTRS stamps today's date on each step. There is no field anywhere for the date the fingerprints were actually taken or the date a result actually arrived. Record a clearance a week late and the file says it happened a week late, and the five-year expiry is counted from the wrong day too.

The notes box is the only place for the real date. Each step overwrites the notes, so only the latest note survives.

What happens when a check clears

Three things, in order:

1. An entry goes into the audit trail for every step, with the kind of check and the new status.
2. PTRS tries to email the staff member, at their own address, to say the check has reached its new status. That email becomes a line in PTRS's log and nothing more. See What happens automatically.
3. On Fully Cleared (Pre-Rap Back) or CHU Approved only, PTRS looks for an in-progress onboarding workflow and ticks the first incomplete task in its Background Check track whose name contains "clearance". In the standard task set that is CHU clearance decision. It then re-checks the track, which may complete it.

Point 3 is the only automatic link between two parts of Staff. An onboarding board can change without anybody touching it.

What PTRS records

The check is on the record with its dates, and counts in Pending BG Checks until it reaches one of six end states: fully cleared, Rap Back enrolled, CHU denied, prohibited offence, expired, or revoked.

Two of those six are the good outcomes, so a cleared check leaves the pending figure the same way a denied one does. The figure counts work outstanding, not risk.

What this does not do

A clearance does not gate anything

PTRS works out whether a person may have contact with children, using Delaware's rule that fingerprinting must be documented first and the check must not be denied, prohibited or revoked. Nothing reads that answer before creating a shift, a check-in, a room assignment, or a place in the ratio. A staff member whose check is CHU Denied can be given a shift tomorrow and the scheduling page will not say a word. The onboarding board has the same problem: see Work an onboarding workflow.

Nothing expires a clearance, and nobody is told it is expiring

A clearance gets an expiry date five years out, and nothing in PTRS ever moves it to Expired when that day comes. The Update Status dialog does not offer Expired from either cleared state, so a five-year-old clearance shows Fully Cleared for ever.

PTRS does look every night for clearances 180, 90 and 30 days from expiry, and for each one writes a line in its own log worded as a credential expiry. No message reaches anybody and nothing on the record changes. Track renewals outside PTRS. The dates are in the record; nothing acts on them.

Rap Back enrolment does not fill in the Rap Back fields

Moving a check to Rap Back Enrolled through Update Status works and is the supported route, and it does not mark the record as enrolled or set the enrolment date. So the status says enrolled while the detail panel says Rap Back is not enrolled. The status is the reliable field.

The dialog offers fewer options than PTRS accepts

From SBI Flagged and FBI Flagged, PTRS accepts either a CHU review or a prohibited offence. The dialog offers only Refer to CHU Review. A prohibited offence, the automatic denial under 31 Del.C. §309(d), therefore has to be recorded as a CHU review followed by a CHU denial, which is a different thing on a different date.

When a check reaches an end state the Update Status button disappears entirely. That is correct, and it can look like a broken page.

The HB 47 banner counts down to a date that has passed

On a fully cleared check not marked as Rap Back enrolled, the detail panel shows a banner reading HB 47 Rap Back Enrollment Required with a countdown to 1 July 2026. That date is fixed inside PTRS. After it, the banner reads "Deadline has passed, enrollment overdue" in red, permanently, on every cleared check not marked enrolled, which, because of the previous item, is every cleared check. Treat it as a reminder that HB 47 exists, not as a status.

Hiding the notes from a staff member is cosmetic

The detail panel shows the check's notes only to directors and administrators. A staff member sees "Additional details are restricted to authorized personnel." instead. But the notes are sent to the staff member's browser either way, and only hidden on the screen. Do not treat that message as a confidentiality control. Anything a front-line staff member should not read does not belong in the notes.

When PTRS refuses

What you see	What it means	What to do
An active background check already exists for staff member '…'.	One is open and has not reached an end state	Finish or end the existing one first
Cannot transition from 'X' to 'Y'.	Out of sequence. The dialog normally prevents this; it appears if the check was moved in another tab	Reload the record
Background check is already in 'X' status.	You chose the status it is already in	Choose the next one
Invalid background check status: '…'. or Invalid background check type: '…'.	Something other than the dialog sent a value PTRS does not know	Use the dialog
Background check with ID '…' was not found.	The check belongs to another organisation, or the page is stale	Reopen from the staff record

Related

• Staff fields and limits, every step and what it stamps
• Work an onboarding workflow, the Background Check track
• What happens automatically, the nightly expiry check
• Staff troubleshooting