Logging an incident

An incident in CleanFlo is any event on a job worth writing down: a slip, a spill, a piece of equipment that failed, a cleaner who went on site without the right gloves, or a near miss that hurt nobody at all. The near misses are the ones people skip, and they are the cheapest safety information a cleaning business will ever get.

Everything lives on Health & Safety, on the Incidents tab, which is the tab the screen opens on. The button in the top right is red and reads Log Incident.

The Incidents tab

The list is one row per incident, newest first. Rows are tinted by status, so an open incident is tinted red and one under review is tinted amber before you have read a word of it. An amber count on the tab itself is the number still needing review, which is open plus under review added together.

The search box beside the tabs reads Search incidents… and matches on the reference, the type, the location and the staff name. The list pages at ten, and Export CSV writes incidents.csv with the columns Ref, Date, Type, Severity, Location, Staff and Status. It exports what you are looking at, so a search filters the file too.

A brand new account has nothing here, and the empty state says so without treating it as a problem. It is worth reading once, because it is the clearest statement of what this tab is for.

The Log Incident form

The button opens a drawer headed Log Incident, subtitled "Record a new health & safety incident". Three sections, and only one field is genuinely required.

Submit with nothing in the description and the form refuses, with the message "Please describe what happened." Everything else can be filled in later from the detail drawer.

What to actually write

The description is the field that will still be read in two years, possibly by somebody with no reason to believe you. Write it in the past tense, name the place, and stop at what you know. "Wet floor sign was at the reception end but not the clinic end" is a fact. "Aisha was not paying attention" is an opinion, and it is the sort of opinion that reads badly when it is quoted back at you.

• What was being done at the moment it happened, not just what happened.
• Where exactly, to a room or a stretch of corridor.
• Who was there, including anyone who was not your staff.
• What was in place already: signs, gloves, guards, the dilution used.
• What the outcome was, including "no injury" when there was none. A near miss with no injury still needs the sentence saying so.

Actions taken is the other half, and it is the one that protects you. It is the record that you did something within minutes rather than at the next monthly meeting. First aid given, area closed, equipment taken out of service, client informed, method changed. If the action was "none", say that too, and say why.

Choosing the severity

Four levels, and they are not decoration. Severity is one of the three numbers that decide how much an unresolved incident takes off your compliance score, so an honestly graded Critical costs five times what a Low does, and a business that grades everything Low is lying to its own dashboard.

High and Critical do one other thing: they reset the Days Injury Free figure on the stat row above the tabs. That card counts whole days since the most recent high or critical incident, and where a business has never logged one it counts from the day the company record was created and says "No high or critical incident on record" underneath.

From open to closed

Every new incident is Open. Opening one from the list gives you a drawer headed with its reference and its type, with the severity and status pills, the location, the staff involved, the date, and the two blocks you wrote: What happened and Actions taken.

Mark Under Review is offered only while the incident is Open. Close Incident is offered until it is closed. Both are one click with no form, and both are reversible: Edit Details reopens the full form with a Status select added, so an incident closed too early can be put back to Open.

Everything the status change does is immediate. The pill on the row changes, the row tint changes, the Open Incidents card recounts, the amber badge on the tab recounts, and the compliance score is recalculated the next time either the Health & Safety screen or the dashboard loads. There is no nightly job and no "apply" step.

What an open incident costs you

Your compliance score starts at 100 and things come off it. Unresolved incidents are the largest of the four categories that can take points, capped at 35, and each one is worked out from three multiplied numbers.

1. Severity, which sets the base: 10 for Critical, 7 for High, 4 for Medium, 2 for Low.
2. Status, which scales it: an Open incident counts at full weight, one Under Review at 0.6. A Closed one is not in the sum at all.
3. Age, which fades it: full weight within 30 days, 0.6 within three months, 0.3 within a year, and 0.15 after that. It never reaches zero, because an open record is still open.

So the Medium incident logged this morning and still Open costs 4 × 1 × 1, which is 4 points. The High one from five days ago that somebody is reviewing costs 7 × 0.6 × 1, which is 4.2. A Low near miss left open for two years costs 2 × 1 × 0.15, which is 0.3: still there, still visible, no longer dominating the number.

The cap matters as much as the arithmetic. Twenty open low-severity incidents cannot take your score below 65 on their own, because this category stops at 35 points and CleanFlo tells you it has stopped: "Capped at 35 points for this category", with the number of points it declined to deduct. There is always a route back.

Your own reporting duty

This is the part to be clear about. CleanFlo does not report anything to the Health and Safety Executive. There is no RIDDOR field on the form, no RIDDOR flag on the record, and no submission of any kind. Logging an incident here creates your internal record and emails you a copy. That is all it does, and it is deliberately all it claims to do.

Deleting an incident is possible from the drawer, under a danger heading, and CleanFlo names the reference in the confirmation and says it cannot be undone. Think hard before you use it. Correcting a record is what Edit Details is for, and a corrected record is defensible in a way that a missing one never is.