Catch a certification before it lapses

A lapsed certification is the kind of problem that is trivial to prevent, tedious to track, and occasionally serious. Insurance, professional licences, security accreditations, training that has to be redone annually.

They all expire on a date written down somewhere nobody looks.

Get the records into Documents

Certificates, licences, training records, whatever you have, however messy. You are not building a register yet; you are making the dates readable.

Ask what you are actually holding

Read our certification and licence records and tell me, for each one:

  what it is and who holds it
  when it expires
  how long renewal usually takes
  what happens if it lapses

Sort by expiry, soonest first. If a document does not state an expiry, say
so rather than assuming it does not expire.

Most companies find one thing already expired and one they had forgotten they held. That first run is usually the whole return on this playbook.

Set the task by lead time, not by the date

Different renewals take different lengths of time. A certificate that renews in a day and one that needs a three-month assessment should not both alert a fortnight out.

For each certification, create a task before it expires, timed by how long
its renewal actually takes plus two weeks of slack.

Title it with what it is, who holds it, and the real expiry date. In the
description, note what renewal involves and link the document.

Assign it to whoever holds the certification, and copy me.

"Plus two weeks of slack" is not padding, it is the difference between a reminder and a task. A renewal that takes six weeks, flagged six weeks out, arrives on the day it becomes urgent, which means any delay is already a lapse. The slack is what makes it a piece of work rather than an emergency.

Re-read it quarterly

Every quarter, re-read our certification records. Flag anything new, any
expiry that changed, and anything whose renewal task no longer matches its
document.

Records get replaced and dates move. A register built once is accurate for about a year.

Assign to the holder, not to admin

Whoever holds the certification is the only person who can actually renew it. Routing every renewal through one administrator creates a bottleneck and a single point of forgetting.

What good looks like

Nothing lapses, and the first run finds at least one thing you did not know you were carrying.

The measure is whether any renewal task is ever completed in the last week before expiry. If they are, the lead times in your register are wrong.