Occupational safety

What occupational safety records are and what they are for

Occupational safety records are the demonstrable evidence that an employer meets its health and safety duties: that employees have been through an occupational health check-up, that every workplace accident is written into the accident book, and that the accident was reported to the insurer and to the labour inspectorate. The Occupational safety module in eIntranet keeps these three agendas in one place, with the paperwork attached to the records it belongs to.

In practice it solves a situation every HR officer knows: medical opinions sit in a binder, the accident book is a spreadsheet on a network drive, and nobody finds out whose certificate has expired until an inspector asks. The module removes that split by putting check-ups, accidents and expiring deadlines into one application, under the same permissions you already use for attendance or holidays.

The module has three tabs. Deadline watch is an overview of expiring validity across both training and medical opinions. Occupational health check-ups holds the medical opinions with the type of check-up, the work category and the conclusion. Accident book records workplace accidents with automatic numbering, attachments and reporting by data message.

How the module works step by step

Recording a check-up starts with the employee and the type. The module distinguishes five types: entry, periodic, extraordinary, exit and follow-up. You add the date performed, how long the medical opinion is valid, the work category, the occupational health provider and the name of the assessing doctor.

The conclusion has four values: fit for work, fit with conditions, unfit, and long-term loss of fitness. Choosing the conditional verdict opens a text field for the restriction – typically no night shifts, or no lifting above a given weight. You drag the scanned opinion into the dropzone on the record and it stays with it, encrypted on disk.

An accident works differently. Leave the accident number empty and the application fills in the sequence as YYYY/number, so the series stays unbroken even when several people write into the book. The date and the time of the accident are entered separately, because the exact hour often matters for the investigation. Then come the place, the activity, a description of the event, the type of injury, the injured body part and witnesses.

Sick leave is entered as a from–to range and the number of days is calculated for you, both end days included. That number is not merely informative: the module uses it to decide whether a report is still missing. An unreported accident with more than three days of incapacity is highlighted in orange, a fatal accident in red.

Investigating an accident does not end with the entry, though. On the record detail you add notes, each with its own attachments and the name of whoever wrote it – the medical report, a witness statement, correspondence with the insurer. The course of the investigation stays together instead of in one colleague's mailbox.

How the accident report leaves: data message, PDF and a register of authorities

Where the data comes from is a simple question here – a person types it in; there is no reader and no GPS unit. The interesting direction is the opposite one: how the report reaches the insurer and the labour inspectorate without anyone retyping it into a form and taking it to the post office.

Input. Check-ups and accidents are entered by hand; the only automatic source is the Employee training module, from which Deadline watch takes the validity of completed training. The module needs no hardware.

Output. Each accident row carries two send icons – one for the insurer, one for the regional labour inspectorate. A click generates the accident report as a PDF covering the employer, the injured person, the circumstances and the consequences, attaches the documents stored with the record and sends a data message from your company's own data box. The attachments are capped at 20 MB per message and the module rejects a format that data boxes do not support before anything is sent.

After a successful send, the record is marked as reported, the date is filled in, and the ID of the sent data message together with the recipient's box ID is stored. The evidence therefore matches what actually left – not what somebody ticked. From the accident detail you can also click straight through to the data message itself in the Data messages module.

Register of recipients. A data box ID is a seven-character code, and retyping it by hand is the fastest way to send a statutory report somewhere unintended. The application therefore carries a register of the eight Czech regional labour inspectorates with their territorial scope by region, and of the insurers that provide statutory employer liability insurance. In the module settings you pick the region and the right inspectorate is pre-selected; the ID can be overridden by hand in an exceptional case.

One note on cost: sending to a public authority box, that is to the labour inspectorate, is free of charge. Insurers are legal entities, so a message to their box is a postal data message – a paid service of the data box operator, not ours.

What the module can do

What the module does not contain: records of personal protective equipment, work categorisation as a separate agenda, or generation of the official Czech statutory accident form. Those three are out of scope for now, and it is more honest to write that than to promise it.

How to choose occupational safety software: what to ask before buying

There are plenty of offers for "health and safety software" and they differ in what they actually solve. Five questions that expose the differences faster than a demo:

• Does it record check-ups for everyone, or only drivers? Many systems handle medical check-ups only as a column on a vehicle or a driver. For employees who do not drive, there is then nowhere to put the opinion.
• Does it send the report, or only tick a box? The difference between recording that you sent something and actually sending it is the whole point of this agenda. Ask specifically about the data box.
• Where do the health data end up? A medical conclusion is a special category of personal data under Article 9 of the GDPR. Ask what permission levels the system has and whether it can restrict a user to their own records.
• Does it show expiring validity in one place? Training and medical opinions usually live in two separate agendas. If the system does not join them, they are watched by hand in two places.
• What happens to a deleted record? With an agenda that inspectors examine years later, reversible deletion is a meaningful difference from permanent removal.

And one question worth turning on yourself: how many people in the company actually write into these records. With health and safety it tends to be two to four, not the whole company – and that affects the price more than the per-user rate does.

Occupational safety for small firms and for higher-risk operations

The need breaks at two points: the work category, and whether the company has its own safety officer or hires one.

An office of up to ten people, work category 1. Check-ups are the entry one and then nothing for a long time; accidents are rare. Here the module mainly serves as the place where an opinion does not vanish when the HR officer changes, and as insurance that nobody's exit check-up is forgotten.

Manufacturing, a warehouse or a construction site, categories 2 to 4. Check-ups repeat at shorter intervals, extraordinary ones appear and accidents are not exceptional. This is where Deadline watch with reminders starts to pay off, and above all the sending of reports – with several accidents a year, the gap between "generate and send" and "fill in a form and take it to the post office" is noticeable.

An external safety officer. Companies that outsource health and safety often face the situation that the officer has the paperwork and the company has nothing. The module is then used as the company's own record, which the officer writes into or draws from, with restricted rights as needed.

What occupational safety records cost

The most common question is whether you pay for the employees whose check-ups you keep in the module. You do not. You pay for users with access to the application – for those who log in. An employee whose opinion is on file and who never logs in does not affect the price.

That matters here, because typically two to four people write into this agenda: the HR officer, the safety officer and the managing director. A fifty-person manufacturing company therefore need not pay for fifty users if only those three are let into the application.

Prices per user and month, excluding VAT, by number of users and plan:

The Occupational safety module is included in every plan; there is no separate charge for it. The plans differ in storage per user – 0.5 GB on Basic, 2 GB on Normal and 4 GB on Extra – which is not irrelevant for this agenda, because scanned opinions and accident photographs take up more room than text data. Telephone technical support is available on the Extra plan only.

The module needs no hardware. Unlike attendance or the journey log, there is no reader and no unit to buy. The one cost beyond the plan you may meet is the postal data message – sending to an insurer as a legal entity is charged by the data box operator, whereas sending to the labour inspectorate as a public authority is free. Consulting, training and custom development are quoted individually.

The current price list is on the pricing page.

Occupational safety records for free: what works and where the limit is

An accident book in Excel is free, and for a company with one accident in five years it may be a sensible answer. It has one property that is harder to explain during an inspection, though: a spreadsheet can be overwritten without leaving any trace. Demonstrability is exactly where a file on a network drive differs from records with history and reversible deletion.

The same goes for check-ups. A shared calendar with a reminder on the validity date works while you have five employees in one work category. It cannot distinguish the type of check-up, store the scanned opinion with the record, or limit who sees the conclusion – and with health data under Article 9 of the GDPR, that last point is where a calendar does not help.

When you do not need us. If you run a three-person office in work category 1 with an external safety officer who keeps and owns the documentation, the module adds little. The same holds if you already keep these records in an HR system that handles medical opinions and sends the reports. Paying for a second home for the same data makes no sense.

You can try it without deciding: eIntranet comes with 14 days free, this module included.

How to roll the module out

Rollout has three steps and none of them is a months-long project.

1. Permissions. In Settings → Occupational safety you assign the five levels. A workable split: the HR officer and the safety officer get write access, managers read-all, other employees level 5, where they see only their own records. Rights can be granted individually or to a whole position.

2. Data boxes. In the same settings you choose the company's sending box, the region with its regional labour inspectorate, and your insurer. Without this step the module works as a record, but you cannot send reports from it.

3. Historical data. There is no bulk import for check-ups, so valid opinions are entered by hand. That is less work than it sounds: only opinions that are still valid matter, and even in a larger company those number in the dozens. Expired opinions need not be entered at all. Once the check-ups are in, add the reminder cascade in the settings – typically 30;14;7.

Backfilling the accident book usually makes no sense; start with the first accident after rollout and leave earlier years in the original records.

What to read next

The Occupational safety module builds on two other agendas. Employee training is the source of the training validity you see in Deadline watch, and sends its own reminders about it. Employees holds the personal data used in the accident report – date of birth, personal identification number and address.