Absence Cost and Pattern Tracker

On the figures this ships with, the person with the highest absence score lost five days. The person who lost twelve scores a quarter as much.

That is not an error. It is what the Bradford Factor does: it squares the number of separate absences, so five single days score 125 and one five-day absence scores 5. Twenty-five times the score, for identical days lost. The formula is built to target frequency rather than duration, and it does that job exactly as designed.

The difficulty is what frequent, short and unpredictable absence usually is. It is the ordinary pattern of a chronic condition, a disability, a mental health problem, or a child who keeps being sent home from school. A threshold applied automatically therefore lands hardest on the people least able to do anything about it.

This page prints the score because employers use it and leaving it out would not change that. It prints that warning beside it every single time — including in a quiet year when nothing is wrong, because a warning that only appears when there is a problem is one nobody has read by the time it matters. A high score is a reason to ask somebody how they are. What happens after that is a judgement about a person, and no formula makes it for you.

Underneath it is the ordinary arithmetic nobody does: days lost, what they cost at a figure you set, and the absence rate. The rate is refused as a finding under thirty people, for the same reason every other refusal in this shop exists — below that it is one person’s bad winter.

It also catches the mistake that makes the rest meaningless. An absence lasts at least a day, so more occasions than days is a typing error rather than an unusual pattern, and those rows are marked and not scored.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two years side by side is the comparison worth having, because absence moves with the season and with whatever is going round.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.