Certification Expiry Tracker: Renew Certs Before They Lapse, Not After

The problem this kills

You track certifications in a spreadsheet — forklift licenses, first-aid, CPR, food handling, electrical tickets, security clearances, professional licenses. Every row has an issue date and an expiry date, and somewhere in there is a person whose cert quietly lapsed three weeks ago. You don't find out until an auditor asks, or a manager schedules them onto a job they're no longer certified to do.

The spreadsheet can't remind anyone. It can't count down to an expiry, email the employee at 90 days, nudge the manager at 30, or shout when someone crosses into "lapsed." So the work falls on one person to eyeball hundreds of dates and chase renewals by memory — and the misses are the expensive kind: a failed audit, a safety incident, a contract clause you breached without knowing. You don't need to live like this, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You import your cert register (employee, cert type, issuer, issue date, expiry date, and an evidence file). The tool computes each cert's status — valid, expiring soon, or lapsed — using a reminder cadence you set per cert type (e.g. 90/60/30/7 days out), and it handles the real-world wrinkles: certs with no expiry, grace periods, and different cadences for different cert types. Each morning it emails staged reminders via Resend to the employee and their manager, and it flags anyone who is working while lapsed. A live dashboard shows the whole workforce at a glance, color-coded by status. When a cert is renewed, the coordinator reviews and approves the new dates before the register updates — and the old record is kept as a version, so you always have the history.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which cert types you track, exactly what your register columns are named, your reminder cadence per cert type, how you handle no-expiry certs and grace periods, who each employee's manager is, your typical and peak volumes, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the status rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the register import, the expiry-and-status computation, the staged reminder emails, the live status dashboard, the coordinator review-and-approve screen for renewals, and the working-while-lapsed flag — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no integration to your HR system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real compliance tooling, so it ships with the controls a safety or HR team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's records, a complete audit trail of who added, approved, and renewed which certs and when, a hard human-approval gate so no new cert record or renewal updates the register until the coordinator signs off (reminders send automatically — only status-changing writes are reviewed), and duplicate guards keyed on employee + cert type so the same person can't have two competing active records for the same cert. Evidence files live in secure Storage, and anyone working while lapsed is surfaced, not buried.

Who it's for

Compliance coordinators, safety managers, and HR ops who track certifications in a spreadsheet and find out about lapses too late. If you can describe how you decide when a cert needs renewing, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your live cert dashboard take shape the same afternoon.