Disciplinary case ageing and deadline board
Problem
Open disciplinary cases live in a spreadsheet the disciplinary secretary keeps by hand: one row per incident, a status column, and a date somebody meant to update. Deadlines for submitting a charge, holding a hearing, or closing an appeal window are not in that spreadsheet; they are in the disciplinary secretary's head, or scribbled in a diary. When that person is on leave, or juggling six cases in the run-up to a busy weekend, a case slips. A charge goes out a day late and the panel has to decide whether it still stands. An appeal window closes without anyone chasing the response. Nobody finds out until a club's lawyer points it out, and by then the competition administrator is explaining to a board why a sanction cannot be enforced.
Product idea
A board that lists every open case with its current stage (report received, under review, charge issued, hearing scheduled, appeal open) and, for each stage, the date the next action is due. Cases are colour coded by how close they are to that date, and any case that crosses an agreed threshold sends an alert to the disciplinary secretary by email, with a second alert to the competition administrator if nobody has updated the case within a set number of days. Deadlines are configured per competition, because tariffs and timeframes vary, rather than fixed in the tool. It does not draft charges, run hearings, or decide sanctions: it exists to make sure nothing sits untouched past the point where it stops being fixable.
Who it is for
Disciplinary secretaries managing a caseload across several competitions, competition administrators who need to know when a case is at risk, and officials development managers who want visibility without asking for a status update.
Possible first version
A web board fed by manual case entry: incident reference, subject, stage, and the date each stage's action is due. A configurable set of stage deadlines per competition, a colour status per case, and a daily email digest of cases past or approaching their threshold. Alerts go by email only. There is no integration with the case and disciplinary system or the competition management platform in version one; cases are entered and updated by hand, and closing a case out of the tool does not close it anywhere else.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Disciplinary secretary, Competition administrator, Officials development manager
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Case and disciplinary systems, Competition management platforms, Spreadsheets, Email and phone
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
We already track cases in a spreadsheet. Why replace something that works?
The spreadsheet records what a case is; it does not tell anyone that a deadline is four days away unless someone opens it and checks the date column against today. That is the gap this closes. If the spreadsheet is genuinely being checked against every deadline every week without incident, this tool has nothing to add. Most disciplinary secretaries running six or more concurrent cases across a season find that check slips exactly when the caseload is heaviest, which is the point at which a missed deadline costs the most.
Does it pull cases automatically from our case and disciplinary system?
Not in version one. Cases, stages and due dates are entered by hand, the same information a secretary already holds, just moved into one place with a deadline attached. An automatic feed from a case system is a reasonable second step once the board has proved useful, but building that integration before anyone has used the tool risks months of work against a workflow nobody has validated yet.
Who is responsible for keeping the deadlines and case entries current?
The disciplinary secretary owns the case entries, since they are the person handling each matter day to day. Someone, usually the officials development manager or a competition administrator, needs to own the deadline configuration itself: which stages exist, how many days each allows, and who gets the second alert. If that configuration is set once and never revisited as the disciplinary code changes, the board will quietly start giving wrong warnings.
Does it decide whether a case is time-barred or tell us what sanction applies?
No. It tracks dates against deadlines you configure and tells you when one is close or passed; it does not interpret the disciplinary code, calculate a suspension, or advise on whether a case can still proceed. Those decisions stay with the disciplinary secretary and the panel. Mixing status tracking with legal interpretation is exactly the kind of scope creep that turns a simple board into a system nobody trusts.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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