The Build Sheet #2: A date without a source is a fact you cannot trust later

The Build Sheet. Behind the build of operational readiness.

Last week I wrote about a status without a reason. When someone left active status, the record captured that it happened and not why. Retired, transferred, injury, cert lapse, and light duty all looked the same.

The next gap in that same record is a date without a source.

A credential expires on a Tuesday in March. The cell says 03/31. Where did that date come from? The National Registry? The state office? A card photocopied in 2019? The last person who updated the spreadsheet? Typed from memory during a busy week?

Six months later those look identical. They are not. One you can stand behind in a compliance review. One you cannot. One you can use when you are deciding who can still be ALS, who can still drive, who is actually off the recall list. One you have to go reconstruct.

Public safety agencies live with this in a hundred places. Last-trained. Medical clearance. Effective date of a status change. Pump test. Fit test. The date is captured. The source is not. The source is the part somebody will need later.

This is a working note on the record, not a ship announcement. We have not written a date-source rule into the product yet. The hunch is simple: if a date is going to sit in an operational picture, it has to say where it came from, and when that source was last checked. Even if that makes a form slightly longer.

The uncomfortable version of the question: if the training officer who typed that date left in June, can anyone still tell whether March 31 is a fact or a guess?

We are building Parallax ORP to be usable by the person who inherits the system, not just the person who set it up. Status without a reason was the first hole. Date without a source is the next one I keep running into in the same record.

If you have ever had to reconstruct a certification date from a filing cabinet the night before a review, you already know why this is next.