Raise a disciplinary case

What this achieves

Raising a case records a conduct incident against one employee and starts the process that decides what follows from it. What you write here is the account the rest of the case rests on, and it stays on the record whatever the outcome.

Required role: Administrator or Manager. A manager can raise a case only for someone who reports to them.

Before you start

The violation catalog must contain an active type covering the incident. If nothing fits, that is a gap in the catalog to fix first — do not file the incident under a type that does not describe it, because the type decides the severity, the ladder, and which past incidents count.

Write your account before you open the form. This is not a draft you polish later: the case is submitted for review the moment you create it, and the interface has no edit control for a case once it exists.

Steps

Go to Disciplinary → Disciplinary Cases.
Select Raise a Case.
Choose the Employee.
Choose the Violation type.
Set the Incident date. It cannot be in the future.
Write the Description — what happened.
Attach Evidence with Add file, if you have any. This is optional.
Add each witness with Add witness, giving a Name and a Statement.
Select Create case.

Options on this screen

Option	Description
Employee	Who the case is about. A manager sees the people who report to them; an administrator sees anyone.
Violation type	What the case is about. It sets the severity and the escalation ladder the case will resolve against.
Incident date	When it happened. Cannot be in the future.
Description	Your account of what happened.
Evidence	Supporting files. Optional.
Witnesses	A name and a statement for each witness.

Write the description as a record

The description is read by whoever reviews the case, by the employee when the action is served on them, and by anyone who looks at the case afterwards. Write what happened, when, and what was observed. Leave out conclusions about the person.

Example: recording that Tom Hargreaves arrived at 10:15 for an 08:00 shift on 12 May 2026, with no notice given, is a fact anyone can check. Recording that he is unreliable is not, and it is the sentence that will be quoted back at you.

Creating also submits

Selecting Create case creates the case and sends it for review in the same action. There is no separate submit step and no draft you can come back to.

Once submitted, the case can be cancelled while it is still awaiting review, but it cannot be edited. If the account is wrong, cancel it and raise a new one rather than leaving an inaccurate record in place.

What happens next

The case goes for review. Where the disciplinary policy requires approval, it routes through the approval workflow; otherwise it waits for an administrator to review it directly. Nothing reaches the employee yet: the stage, the consequences, and the letter are all decided at approval, not here.

If this is a repeat of the same violation within its reset window, the reviewer will see which incident it is and which rung of the ladder that produces.