Tool
One absence with a certificate, end to end
Five numbers of your own: how many events reach payroll a month, how many minutes each one takes, what an hour of the person doing it costs, what share ends in an error and what fixing it on a payslip costs. Below, the same case with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
One absence with a certificate, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the case
- Read the notice and understand itWhatsApp
Reads the message as it arrives, tells an absence from a late arrival, and asks exactly one follow up question when something is missing.
- Record the day's eventAttendance
Writes the record into the attendance system the same day it happened, in the format the system expects.
- Ask for the certificate and keep askingWhatsApp
Asks as soon as the absence is recorded, asks again at 24 and 48 hours, and stops asking once it arrives.
- Read the certificate and validate itWhatsApp
Reads the photo: pulls the date, the days prescribed, the practitioner and the licence number, and says on the spot if the image is cropped or illegible.
- File it where it belongsDrive
Saves it in the employee's folder under the name the company uses, with nobody renaming a file.
- Arrange the doctor's visitCompany doctor
Calls or messages the company doctor, passes the address and a time window, books the visit and records what the doctor verified.
- Pass it to payrollPayroll
Writes the right entry in the right period, which is the stretch where the error gets paid on the payslip.
- Decide whether the absence is justifiedAttendance
A person decides this. They arrive with the certificate already read, the visit done and the month's history in view.
Today that is 70 hours a month and 12 events that end badly. Between the time and the corrections, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 7 of the 7 steps, 3 hours and USD 63 are left.
The difference is USD 1,257 a month, USD 15,086 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the errors that stop happening because the figure never gets retyped into the next screen.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Decide whether the absence is justified.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The one modelling assumption, and the one worth arguing with: an error born of carrying a figure from one system to another by hand falls in the same proportion as those hand-offs stop being manual.
This object is the interactive half of an article: One absence with a medical certificate crosses four systems and one person