A small HR consultancy usually starts with a spreadsheet and a shared inbox. That works with a handful of clients. It stops working when two people are on the same case, a deadline sits in someone’s head, or a client asks what has happened so far and the answer is spread across emails.
What every case needs
- One owner. Someone is responsible for the next step, and everyone can see who.
- A next action and a date. A case with no next action is a case nobody is moving.
- The documents and correspondence. Attached to the case, not filed somewhere else.
- A running record. What was decided, by whom and when. In a dispute, this is the part that matters.
- The time spent. Recorded as the work happens, so billing doesn’t depend on memory.
Where spreadsheets give out
Deadlines are the first casualty. Employment cases are full of dates that can’t move, and a column of dates doesn’t warn anyone. The second is access: sharing a spreadsheet with a client or a colleague means sharing all of it. The third is history. A spreadsheet shows where a case is now, not how it got there.
What to automate, and what not to
Reminders, hand-offs between colleagues and the monthly report are good to automate, because they are repetitive and easy to forget. Judgement is not. Whether a case should settle, or what to say to a difficult client, belongs to a person. Software should clear the admin away so that person has more time for it.
A simple test
Pick a case from three months ago and try to answer four questions in under a minute: what happened, who did it, what was said to the client, and how much time it took. If that takes more than a minute, the tracking is costing you more than it should.
Trunkfield Software, Lichfield