Competence expiry tracking for a small rail firm

How to stop competence, medical and Sentinel expiries catching you on the morning of a shift.

Every rail business runs on dates: Sentinel card expiry, PTS and COSS competence, medicals, drugs and alcohol screening, track-specific competences, and the client's own requirements on top. In a small firm those dates usually live in a spreadsheet one person maintains, and the failure mode is always the same: nobody looks at the spreadsheet until the access controller does.

What good looks like

• One list of people, one list of competences per person, one expiry date per competence, and nothing else duplicated anywhere.
• Warnings at 90, 60 and 30 days, sent to the person and to whoever books the training, not just filed in a column.
• A "who can I roster tonight?" view that only shows people whose dates are clear for the work and the location.
• The evidence (the certificate, the card scan, the medical letter) attached to the date, so an auditor sees it in one click.

How to get there without new software

Start with the spreadsheet you have. The first job is to make it the only copy: delete the others and tell everyone where it lives. The second is to add the three warning dates as columns and a weekly check that emails the list. That alone catches most lapses. The third is to pull Sentinel's own data in rather than retyping it; the card number is the key that ties everything together.

When that works, the same list drives your TBS packs, your rostering and your client's competence returns, which is where the real hours come back.

Want this done for you? That is what the free half-day audit is for.