Sickness and fit notes

Sickness is recorded, not requested. It is not on the list your cleaners can pick from when they ask for time off, on purpose: somebody phoning in ill is not asking for anything, and a request sitting pending would lose the day it is about. Use Record an absence on the Availability tab of their staff record. It is filed as already agreed, with your name against it as the person who took the call.

The seven-day line

An employee self-certifies the first seven calendar days of a sickness absence. Beyond that you may ask for a fit note from a doctor. Calendar days, not working days, and both ends counted: Monday to the following Sunday is seven and still self-certifiable; the Monday after is eight and not.

The form works this out from the dates as you type them and says which side of the line you are on. When you record a sickness absence there is also a Self-certified box, which appears for sickness and for nothing else.

Filing a fit note

A sickness row carries Attach fit note. It takes a PDF or a photo, up to 20MB, which in practice means a picture of the note taken on a phone. Once attached the row shows Fit note instead, which opens it, and a bin to remove it.

The file is also renamed on the way in, and this matters more than it sounds. CleanFlo gives it a meaningless name of its own and discards yours. A file called “anxiety-fit-note.pdf” would put a diagnosis into a field that was only ever meant to be a pointer, where more people can read it than can open the document itself.

There is no absence score, and there will not be

CleanFlo has no Bradford Factor. No absence rate, no episode count, no reliability figure built from days off, and no trigger threshold. This is a decision, not a gap, and it is written into the product’s own compliance record.

The reason is what such a number does in the room. A single figure ranking your cleaners by how often they are ill, sitting next to the button that assigns Tuesday’s work, invites a decision about somebody’s clean made on a number nobody examined, and some of what it counts will be disability-related absence, which is exactly the decision that becomes a tribunal claim.

You can see every absence a person has had, with its dates, its kind and what it was worth in hours. That is the information. Turning it into a ranking is the part CleanFlo will not do for you.

What is recorded, and what is not

Recorded

That the absence was sickness, its dates, whether either end was a half day, what it was worth in hours, whether it was self-certified, any note you wrote, and who recorded it.

Not recorded

A diagnosis. There is no illness field, no symptom picker and no return-to-work questionnaire. The note field’s own hint asks you to record the fact rather than the condition.

Not asked at all

The self-certification box and the fit note appear for sickness and nowhere else. The database refuses them on any other kind of leave, so a holiday cannot end up carrying health data by accident.

Sickness absence and its fit note are kept for three years from the end of the absence, matching HMRC’s period for sick-pay records. At that point the fit note is deleted and the absence itself is kept without it.