Referee qualification and safeguarding check expiry monitor
Problem
Every official's qualification, Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check and refresher training expiry date sits in a spreadsheet the officials development manager updates when there is time. The appointments officer works from a separate list and has no reliable way to see whether an official due to take a fixture this weekend still has a valid safeguarding check. A lapse is usually caught late: a parent or club asks a question, someone checks the spreadsheet, and it turns out the check expired weeks ago and nobody sent the reminder. By then the official has already been appointed to matches during the gap, and the governing body has no record of when the lapse was noticed or who was told.
Product idea
A status board listing every registered official with their qualification tier, DBS check date and refresher training due date, colour coded by how close each is to expiry. Automatic alerts go to the official and the officials development manager at set intervals before a check lapses, not just on the day it does. Once a check passes its expiry date, the official is flagged as unavailable on the board so the appointments officer can see it before booking, rather than after. It does not issue certificates, process DBS applications or replace the governing body's own compliance system; it only tracks the dates that system produces and makes the gap visible before it becomes a problem.
Who it is for
Officials development managers, who would sponsor it, referee appointments officers checking availability before confirming a fixture, and competition administrators responsible for officiating compliance.
Possible first version
A dashboard populated from a manually uploaded CSV of officials, their qualification tier, DBS check date and training due date. Red, amber and green status per official, with email alerts sent at set intervals in the weeks before a check lapses, addressed to the official and the officials development manager. Officials past expiry show as unavailable on the board. Version one has no write back to the appointment or rostering system: the appointments officer checks the board manually before confirming an appointment, and there is no integration with any DBS or governing body compliance system.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 1-2 week prototype
- Roles involved
- Officials development manager, Referee appointments officer, Competition administrator
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Spreadsheets, Appointment and rostering tools, Email and phone
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need to get this running for our officials list?
A spreadsheet or export with each official's name, qualification tier, DBS check date and next training due date is enough to start. There is no need to migrate that data anywhere permanently: it is uploaded to seed the board and can be re-uploaded whenever the underlying record changes. The one thing worth agreeing before build is which expiry types matter for your competition, because not every governing body tracks the same set of checks, and the alert timing should match your actual renewal cycle rather than a generic default.
Does this replace our governing body's own compliance or DBS system?
No. The check itself, the application, the certificate and the renewal all stay with the Disclosure and Barring Service process and your governing body's own record. This board only reads the dates that process produces and puts them somewhere the appointments officer can actually see before booking an official. If the governing body's system is wrong, this board will be wrong too; it is a visibility layer, not a system of record.
Our development manager already keeps this in a spreadsheet. Why change it?
The spreadsheet tracks the dates. It does not alert anyone before they lapse, and the appointments officer usually cannot see it at all when booking a fixture. The gap this closes is not the record, it is the warning and the visibility at the point an appointment is made. If nobody currently misses a renewal and nobody has ever appointed an official with a lapsed check, the spreadsheet is genuinely fine and this is not worth building.
Who has to keep this updated once it exists?
The officials development manager owns the underlying data and re-uploads it when checks are renewed or new officials register. That is a real ongoing task, not a one-off setup: a board showing stale dates is worse than no board, because it tells the appointments officer an official is fine when the record simply was not updated. Version one deliberately keeps the update step manual so the cost of running it is visible before anyone commits to a live data feed.
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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