Every employee. Every record. One place.

An employment contract is a history, not a field

What is most often demanded in a labour dispute is neither a payslip nor an attendance record but the contract. And the question asked is usually not "what is their contract?" but "which contract was in force on that date?" — a system keeping one record edited whenever something changes cannot answer.

So a renewal creates a new contract rather than editing the existing one, and the employee shows a full contract history with the newest first. Overwriting the old one erases what may be the important part: each contract's term, the sequence of renewals, and whether they started fixed-term and became open-ended — exactly what seniority and end-of-service rights are built on.

The contract type selects the printed template, which ends a chronic problem: files on different machines, an old version used by mistake, and contracts going out with clauses amended a year ago.

The penalty ladder: progression as a property, not a decision

Progression in discipline is a condition of a penalty's validity, not an administrative choice. Yet executing it is where most companies fail — not because they reject it but because they have nothing telling them this is the third time and not the first.

So a violation is defined with an ordered ladder of levels — each a type, a value and a position — bound to an escalation window: a month, six months, a year, or from the hire date. The first occasion takes the first level and a repeat inside the window climbs it. Someone who erred once three years ago and again today is not a repeat offender in any reasonable sense.

Not every penalty is a deduction: the first levels are administrative by nature — a caution, a written warning — recorded with no money changing hands. Their value is documenting the progression that makes a later deduction defensible.

Custody and uniform: a hand-over versus a deduction

Most companies discover the scale of what their people hold on the day someone resigns — the worst possible moment. The basic confusion is treating custody as a financial debt: a laptop is not an amount owed but a company asset in someone's possession. The company does not want its price, it wants the laptop.

So a custody record is kept by quantity rather than money: delivered minus returned, and a return larger than what is held is not accepted. When a resignation is approved the system creates return transactions automatically — a physical hand-over, not a deduction.

Uniform looks like a kind of custody and is its opposite in treatment: a worn item is not reissued and has no resale value, so recovering it physically is meaningless. What appears as a deduction at final settlement is therefore unreturned uniform, not custody — and the distinction avoids two errors: deducting for a device that actually came back, and forgetting the value of a uniform that never will.

Exit: the request does not end the service

The most practical point in the exit cycle: someone who has submitted a resignation is still an employee. They attend, their pay is computed, they accrue leave, they may work overtime. Changing their status the moment the request is filed cuts all of that off abruptly.

So the request opens the path and the settlement closes it. The request shows the employee the custody they hold at submission, so they know what to return before their last working day rather than after. They cannot have more than one open request at a time.

The settlement carries three computed blocks each tied to a salary element: the gratuity computed in service-length tiers with a cap on the years counted, the leave-balance payout, and other deductions. Marking the stop changes the status, records the last working day and re-points the leaver's subordinates — the step that prevents a team left hanging without a manager.

Three movements that change an employee's status

"The employee's status changed" hides three entirely different operations, and handling them through one path is the source of what later shows up as a mismatch between the system and reality.

A promotion

— changes job and pay and preserves the old values first. The salary change applies to the open month immediately, while a future-dated job change happens on its own day.

A transfer

— changes department, branch or reporting line — not job or pay — and goes through approval. Its largest effect is changing the approval line.

Reassignment

— brings a former employee back into the same record rather than opening a second one that splits their history. Immediate with no approval, moving their fixed salary elements into the open month.

Documents: expired versus for follow-up

An expired document raises no alarm. A lapsed ID or an unrenewed licence sits quietly in the file until it is asked for — and by then it is too late, because whatever it is needed for rarely waits.

So there are two dates rather than one: the expiry, which is late by nature, and the follow-up date, far enough ahead to complete a renewal. Separating them makes the list workable: what is for follow-up starts now, what has expired is urgent.

Validity dates are conditional on the document type: a degree certificate does not expire, an ID does. Making them mandatory for all pushes users into fictitious dates, the alert fills with documents needing no renewal, and within two weeks nobody reads it.