Training record software is a small product that gets sold as a large one. Stripped of the dashboards, it is a table with one row per person per course, a few dates, a signature and a file, and everything an employer needs from it is a report over that table. This page is for the safety manager or office manager choosing or replacing one at a United States employer: the fields the row has to hold, the three reports that must read off the rows rather than off a second spreadsheet, the import and export that decide whether you can ever leave, and the features that belong to a learning platform and should not be paid for here. The free tools on this site work the same arithmetic on your own headcount and courses.
The row: person, course, date, sign-off, expiry, evidence
Judge the product on its row before its screens. For each person on each course it must hold the date the training was held, who signed it off, the expiry that follows from the course's refresher interval, and an attached file for the roster, the certificate or the test. It must hold a status that is derived from those dates rather than typed, so that a holding becomes expiring and then expired on the calendar without anyone remembering to change it. And it must hold the requirement separately from the holding: a person can be required to hold a course they have not yet taken, and that gap is the most important row in the table.
Three reports, all read from the rows
The matrix is people against courses with the status in each cell; the dashboard is compliance today, holdings expiring this quarter and the sessions to book; the person's record is every course they hold and when each runs out, printable for the inspector who asks about one operator. All three must be read live from the rows. A product that asks you to maintain the matrix as its own screen, beside the records, has given you two sources of truth and a reconciliation job, and the day they disagree you will not know which one the inspector should believe. Ask the vendor to show a held session changing the matrix cell and the dashboard figure in the same minute.
Import once, export always
Your record exists today in a spreadsheet, and the software is only worth having if that spreadsheet goes in on the first afternoon: a CSV of people with their roles, a CSV of courses with their intervals, a CSV of holdings with dates. Export matters more, because it is what you keep. Everything you put in, people, courses, records and attachments, must come out in bulk in a form a spreadsheet opens, at any time and for a period after you cancel. A product that exports a PDF report but not the table has kept your record; walk away from it.
What to refuse to pay for
A course library, a video player, a quiz builder, a certificate designer, gamification and a learner marketplace are the features of a learning management system, and they are what most training record software is priced on. If your training is delivered in a room by a trainer, on a machine by an evaluator, or by an external provider who issues a certificate, you deliver no content through the software and should pay for none. Per-learner pricing is the other refusal: a record for two hundred people is not ten times the work of a record for twenty, and a bill that scales with headcount punishes you for the record being complete.
Questions people ask about training record software
Is a spreadsheet good enough as training record software?
For a single site with a stable crew and a short course list, often yes, provided one person owns it and the expiry dates are formulas rather than typed. It fails when there are several sites, when supervisors need to add sessions, or when the reminder has to fire without someone opening the file.
Should the software send the reminders or should the record keeper?
The software should compute who is due and write to the record keeper and the supervisor a set number of days before the expiry; the record keeper should still read the quarter's expiries once a month. A reminder that fires only to the learner is missed by the person who books the session.
Is Inductvo training record software?
Inductvo Pro is the record half only: one row per person per course with the date, the sign-off, the expiry and the refresher due, the matrix and the dashboard read from those rows, reminders before a lapse, bulk import and export. It has no course library and no player, on purpose.