Core concepts you'll see everywhere
A few ideas run through the whole product. Once these click, everything else makes sense.
Organizations and locations
Your organization is your whole company in TrainGrid. Within it, locations are your physical sites — plants, warehouses, branches. Every employee belongs to a location, and Supervisors are scoped to specific locations so they only see and manage their own site. You set up your first location during onboarding and can add more under Administration → Locations.
Departments and positions
Inside your organization you organize people two ways:
- Departments — the teams or areas people work in (for example, Production, Sanitation, Shipping).
- Positions — job titles (for example, Line Operator, Forklift Driver).
Both help you filter the matrix and reports, and target training to the right groups. You manage them under Administration → Departments and Administration → Positions.
Employees
Employees are the people whose training you track — active staff at your sites. Each has a profile with their department, position, location, and a full transcript of everything they've been trained on. You can add employees one at a time, or import many at once from a spreadsheet using Import employees from CSV.
Courses and course types
Courses are the individual trainings you deliver — WHMIS, Forklift Operator Certification, HACCP Awareness, and so on. Your Courses catalog is the master list. Each course has a type that describes how it's delivered:
- In-person — classroom or hands-on sessions
- Online — self-paced online modules
- Video — watch-a-video training
- External — training run by an outside provider
- Practical — hands-on skills assessments
Courses can also be marked mandatory, carry a passing grade, and require a certificate.
Assignments (assign → due → complete)
An assignment is one course given to one employee. It's the heart of TrainGrid, and it moves through a simple lifecycle:
- You assign a course to an employee (or many employees at once) and set a due date.
- Time passes; TrainGrid tracks whether it's still on time, coming due, or late.
- You record the completion — with the date, and a grade or certificate if the course needs one.
You do this from Assignments, or straight from the Training Matrix by selecting a cell.
Compliance statuses (calculated, never typed)
Every assignment shows a status. This is the single most important thing to understand: TrainGrid works out the status for you automatically from the dates — you never set it by hand. That's what makes your compliance numbers trustworthy at audit time. The statuses are:
- Completed — done and current.
- Due soon — coming due within your organization's warning window.
- Overdue — past its due date and not yet completed.
- Expired — was completed, but its certificate has passed its expiry date.
- Failed — was completed, but with a grade below the course's passing grade. The record is kept, and it does not count as compliant.
- N/A (waived) — deliberately marked as not applicable to this person.
- Pending — assigned, but not yet started (its due date is still in the future).
Because these are calculated from real dates, they update themselves as time passes — no one can "mark it green" to hide a gap.
Recurrence
Many trainings must be repeated on a cycle — annually, every three years, and so on. When a course is set to recur, completing it automatically schedules the next one for you, on the right date. You never have to remember to re-assign recurring training; TrainGrid keeps the cycle going on its own.
Certificates and expiry
Some courses grant a certificate that's valid for a set period (for example, a forklift certification valid for three years). When you record the completion, you capture the certificate and TrainGrid tracks its expiry date. As that date approaches, the training shows as Due soon, and once it passes, it flips to Expired — so lapsed certifications surface on your Dashboard and in the Expiring certificates report long before they become a problem.