The Average as a Record

The rolling average is derived data. It can be recomputed from the weekly hours at any time, which makes it tempting to treat as a view rather than as a record.

The calculation in “The Average as a Record” depends on complete, consistently coded time records rather than a polished total at the end of the month. When considering see the complete product overview for fte meaning, teams should verify exports, missing-time corrections and period boundaries against their own averaging method before relying on a dashboard.

It is also the number that answers the compliance question, and the decision about whether to store it is more consequential than it looks. Some organisations have concluded, quietly, that not computing it is safer than computing it.

For an independent reference relevant to “The Average as a Record”, consult the Basecamp Shape Up guide. Use it to test working-time definitions, recordkeeping, access, retention and exception handling against the organisation’s real process rather than treating one software report as conclusive.

The argument for not knowing

If the figure is never produced, there is no document showing a breach. The reasoning goes that an organisation cannot be shown to have known what it never calculated.

It is wrong in every respect that matters. The obligation is to comply, not to be ignorant of non-compliance. The records of hours exist and the arithmetic is available to anybody who asks. And a decision not to monitor is itself a finding, usually a worse one than the breaches it was meant to conceal.

What the stored average adds

A contemporaneous record of what the organisation knew and when. That cuts both ways and it cuts favourably far more often.

An organisation that can show a weekly series of computed averages, with the actions taken when people approached limits, is demonstrating a functioning system. One that produces a recomputed figure years later, in response to a question, is demonstrating only that the arithmetic can be done.

Storing it properly

Per person, per week, store: the average as at that week, the limit in force, the opt-out status at the time, and the reference period used.

The last two are what make the stored figure interpretable later. An average of fifty-two means one thing for somebody who had opted out and another for somebody who had not, and the status changes over time.

The recomputation trap

A figure recomputed today from historical data uses today's configuration: today's reference period, today's treatment of absence, today's set of counted categories.

If any of those have changed, the recomputed figure is not the figure that applied at the time. Storing the contemporaneous value avoids an argument that is otherwise unresolvable and that will arise exactly when the configuration has been improved.

What to do with a stored figure that shows a breach

Keep it. Record what was done about it alongside. A series showing a breach, an action and a return to compliance is a far stronger document than a clean series that nobody believes.

Deleting or amending it moves the problem from working time into records, which is a different order of seriousness and which tends to be discovered through the audit trail rather than through the figures.

Who should be able to see it

The same distribution as the live report: the individual, the rota planner, the compliance owner. Historical figures do not need a wider audience than current ones.

They do need to be retrievable, which means stored somewhere with a retention matching the records policy rather than in a reporting tool that keeps ninety days.

The series as an instrument

Beyond compliance, the stored series is the only way to answer whether anything has improved. Breaches this year against last year, by department, with the interventions marked on the timeline.

That is the view that justifies whatever was spent on the integration work described elsewhere in this collection, and it is impossible to produce retrospectively if the figures were never stored.

The position worth being in

Able to say: here is the average for this person for this week, as computed at the time, with the limit then in force and their status then; here is what we did when it approached the limit; and here is the series for the department over three years.

That is a complete answer. It is assembled from a weekly job that writes a few numbers to a table, and the organisations that cannot give it are almost always the ones that decided, without quite saying so, that it was better not to look.

The figure in somebody else's hands

Where an organisation supplies labour to a client, the client may ask for working time figures as part of its own assurance. Those figures leave the building and are read by people with no context.

Send the stored contemporaneous series with its methodology note rather than a recomputed summary. A client comparing two suppliers will treat a documented series as evidence of a system and a tidy single number as a claim, and the second invites exactly the questions the first answers.