Key takeaways
  • Feature grids do not predict rollouts. Completion rate among the people who actually do the job does.
  • Test with five real staff on one real process before you shortlist. It takes an afternoon and settles most arguments.
  • The two structural questions are who must hold a licence, and whether the record names a person.
The test that predicts everything
Five people, one real check, no help

Send the check to five people who actually do that job and count how many complete it without assistance. That number tells you more about your rollout than every demo and reference call combined, and any vendor confident in their product will let you run it in a trial.

Before you look at any tool

  • Write down the one process causing the most chasing today. Evaluate on that, not on a generic scenario.
  • Count the people who must complete a step, and separately the people who need dashboards. Keep both numbers visible.
  • Decide what evidence you will be asked for, by whom, and how far back.

The structural questions

  • Who needs a licence? If every participant needs a paid account, price the full rollout now, not the pilot.
  • Can someone complete work without an account? This decides adoption among staff who will not install anything.
  • Is every submission attributable to a person? Shared logins fail this and the failure is invisible until an audit.
  • Does missed work surface by itself? Otherwise chasing stays a human job and the system is a filing cabinet.
  • Can you export everything yourself? Runs, answers, photos, timestamps, without a support ticket.

The capability questions

  • Scheduling and triggers, so recurring checks cannot be quietly skipped.
  • Conditional logic, so a failure branches into the right follow-up instead of a note.
  • Validation against limits, so an out-of-range reading is caught at entry.
  • Photo and reading capture on the item, not as a separate upload.
  • A corrective-action loop that turns a failure into tracked work with an owner.
  • Offline tolerance for parts of a site with no signal.

The questions people forget

  • What happens in year two when this covers six sites instead of one?
  • Who administers licences when agency staff turn over monthly?
  • What does implementation cost, and is template building included?
  • If we leave, what exactly do we take with us?

Running the trial properly

Two weeks, one process, real people, no hand-holding. Track completion rate, time to complete, how many needed help, and how many checks were missed and whether the system noticed. Then price the full rollout under each vendor's model. If a vendor cannot support that trial, that is itself a finding.