Employee competencies: licences, visas and certificates that expire

1. The Competences tab on an employee's record

1. Open the employee from Employees and go to the Competences tab.
2. The list shows each competency with its type, country where relevant, validity dates and Days Left.
3. Read the list by that last column, not by the dates. A red Overdue means the person is working without a valid document today; an amber count means you have weeks, not months.
4. N / A means no end date was entered. That is legitimate for a qualification that does not expire — but it also means the system can never warn you about it, so do not use it for something that does.
5. Tick Do not show expired competences to see only what is still live. Leave it off when you are cleaning up history.
6. The pencil edits a record, the bin deletes it after a confirmation. Edit rather than re-add when a document is renewed only if you don't need the old dates; otherwise add the new one and keep the history.

2. Add a competency

1. Click Add Competence and pick the Competence Type first — it is what drives the expiry notifications.
2. Set the Country when the document is country-specific, which in practice means visas and work permits. It records where the document is valid, not where the person is from.
3. Fill in the Name as you would say it out loud ("Work visa — Germany"), and use Certificate # for the document number so it can be checked without digging out the scan.
4. Grade and Price are optional. Grade suits licence categories and exam results; price is useful when the company pays for renewals and you want the cost visible.
5. The start and end dates are the point of the record. The end date is what the countdown and the reminder emails are calculated from — leave it blank and this competency will never warn anybody.
6. Missing a type? Add New Competence Type creates one without leaving the dialog. Do it deliberately, though: types are company-wide, and a careless duplicate ("Licence" and "Licences") splits your reporting.
7. Save. The record appears in the list with its days-left pill calculated immediately.

3. Documents, expiry warnings and who gets emailed

1. Attach the actual document to the competency — the scan of the licence, the visa page, the certificate. It is far more useful there than in a shared folder, because it sits next to the dates it belongs to.
2. Preview opens the file in the browser; Download saves it. Each document records who added it and when.
3. When a competency is close to expiry the dialog says so explicitly, and when it has already expired it says how many days ago. Neither is a silent colour change you have to notice.
4. The notification block tells you exactly who will be emailed — the employees and job roles configured on the competence type.
5. If nobody is configured, the email falls back to the company addresses. If those are not set either, the block says so plainly — and that is your cue to go and fix the type, because otherwise the reminder goes nowhere.
6. Adding a competency for several people at once copies the attached documents to each of the records, so a group certificate is uploaded once.

4. The whole company in one screen

1. Open Competences from the main menu for the company-wide view — every competency of every employee in one list.
2. Start from the tiles: Expired (renew now), Expiring < 30 d (urgent), Expiring 30–90 d (plan it), Active. Clicking one filters the list, which turns a 400-row list into a short to-do.
3. Under More filters you can narrow by competence type, country, office, department, job role, employment status, whether documents are attached, and an end-date range — then click Apply filters.
4. "Documents attached" is worth a periodic check on its own: a competency with dates but no scan is a claim, not evidence.
5. Add Competences here creates the same record for several employees at once — the right tool after a group training or a batch of renewals. One record per selected person, in a single action.
6. The list exports to Excel with the filters you applied, which is the usual way to hand a renewal list to whoever books the training.

Related: Competence types and expiry notifications · Employee documents · Basic employee data · The employee list.