Employee Submissions: Reviewing Incident Reports, Grievances & Responses

What Employee Submissions Are

Submissions are the forms employees originate — the opposite direction from HR Documents, which you issue to them. Out of the box every store gets four:

• Incident Report — accidents, injuries, property damage, cash discrepancies, theft or loss, customer disputes, misconduct, equipment failure.
• Grievance / Complaint — working conditions, pay, treatment by a colleague or manager, unfair policy application. Confidential; may be filed anonymously.
• Response to Notice — the employee's written explanation to a Notice to Explain, Show-Cause Memo or Return-to-Work Order, or a request for an extension or an administrative hearing. Launched from the notice itself.
• Resignation Letter — intended last day, notice period, reason.

You can add your own under HR → Staff → Submissions → Form Types. Reviewing requires the Review Employee Submissions permission (granted automatically to roles that already issue HR documents or manage employees; owners always have it).

What Makes a Submission a Record

• Authenticated author. The employee files from their own portal login. No shared device accounts.
• Declaration and signature. A truthfulness declaration plus an on-screen signature, captured with the server time, IP address and device.
• Frozen once filed. Answers, narrative and the form's field layout at the time are locked and hashed. Nothing is edited afterwards — the employee can add attachments and messages, or file an addendum that links back to the original.
• Reference number like INC-2026-8-0001 — form prefix, year, your store ID, running count.
• Timeline. Every status change, assignment, message, extension or hearing decision is logged with who did it and when. Internal notes are marked HR-only and never shown to the employee.
• 201 record. Closing a submission (or clicking File to 201) saves a PDF copy — statement, signature, timeline, proof — to the employee's files, where it shows under HR Records.

Reviewing

1. Open HR → Staff → Submissions. New filings are highlighted; the cards show what is awaiting a first look, what is under review, and what was filed after a deadline.
2. Open a submission. Mark received tells the employee it is in the queue. Assign picks the reviewer and moves it to Under Review.
3. Use the message box to ask follow-up questions — tick Internal note for anything the employee should not see.
4. Resolve with an outcome (reviewed and accepted, action taken, no further action, referred for formal proceedings, dismissed) and notes the employee will read.
5. Close & file to 201 when it is finished. Closed submissions are read-only.

Submissions can be downloaded as a PDF at any point. The HR copy includes internal notes; the employee's copy does not.

Review Chains

Forms with Route through a review chain switched on use the chain under HR → Time-Off Rules → Approval Policies, exactly like leave and overtime: a Department Head step first, then HR, for example. Each step's approver is notified on Telegram and sees the item under HR → Approvals and on the submission page. The default chain is a single HR-reviewer step. Confidential forms never route to department leaders even if the chain names one. Reaching the end of the chain resolves the submission as accepted; dismissing it resolves it as dismissed — you can still add notes and close afterwards.

Responses to a Notice to Explain

When you issue an NTE, the employee's signature on the shared link now records receipt only. Their explanation arrives as a Response to Notice submission linked to the document, with the full receipt-to-response timeline (served, acknowledged, deadline, filed) at the top of the page and a Late badge when it lands after the deadline. The HR Documents list shows the response status on each row.

• Extension requests show a Grant / Decline box. Granting updates the deadline on the notice and tells the employee the new date.
• Hearing requests (and any response) can have a hearing scheduled — date, time, venue — which is logged and sent to the employee.
• An employee who responded through the old shared-link text box before this feature will see that response moved onto a Response to Notice record automatically.

Recording on an Employee's Behalf

For a handwritten form or a verbal report, use Record on Behalf. The record is stamped recorded by HR, you note how it was received, and the employee is asked to review and sign it in their portal. Their confirmation — or dispute — goes on the timeline, so a transcription is never mistaken for the employee's own words.

Confidentiality

Confidential form types (grievances and notice responses by default) are visible to HR reviewers only. Department heads and supervisors see the non-confidential submissions from their own departments. An employee who files a grievance anonymously is shown as Anonymous employee to everyone except HR reviewers, who still see the name so they can follow up and guard against retaliation.

Custom Form Types

Under Form Types, create a form with any mix of short text, paragraph, date, time, number, dropdown and yes/no fields; set whether it needs a signature or attachments, whether it is confidential or anonymous-capable, and whether it routes through a chain. Keep a field with the key narrative for the main statement. Editing fields later creates a new version — submissions already filed keep the fields they were filed with.

Reporting an Incident About Another Employee

Most incident reports are written by the manager on duty or a colleague, not by the person at the centre of it. Name that person in Employee concerned on the form: the report then appears in their history and, when closed, a PDF copy is filed to both 201 records. The employee concerned does not see the report in their own Submissions list — their side of the story comes through the formal notice.

On the HR submission page, Issue Notice from this incident opens a Notice to Explain, Show-Cause Memo or Return-to-Work Order for the employee concerned, pre-filled with the report's date, time, place and narrative, and sets the response deadline. The notice records which incident it came from; the employee's Response to Notice links back to the notice. The Case card then shows the full sequence — incident, notice served, receipt acknowledged, response (or extension / hearing request), hearing, decision — so the twin-notice trail is readable in one place.