Sometimes a team member can't finish a course on time, or shouldn't do it at all for now: they are on leave, off sick, moving to another job or exempt. My Team Training gives you two tools for this. Extend Due Date gives them more time and keeps the course required. Excuse Training waives the course, so it is no longer required, without pretending it was done. Both record who made the change and why.
Where to find it: Training > My Team: open a team member's training with the eye icon, then use the calendar or tick icon on a row.
Extend or excuse?
| Extend Due Date | Excuse Training | |
|---|---|---|
| Use it when | They will do the training, just later. | They should not be doing it now: long leave, a transfer, a genuine exemption. |
| Course is still required | Yes | No |
| Status afterwards | Open (Pending or In Progress), no longer Overdue | Excused |
| Counted on My Team Training | Yes, as an open course | No, left out of the completion rate |
| Reminders and overdue emails | Resume if the new date passes | Stop |
| Undo | Extend again to a later date | Assign the course again |
| Works on | Courses and document training | Courses only |
Extending a due date
- On Training > My Team, click the eye icon on the person's row.
- In Assigned Training, click the calendar icon (Extend Due Date) on the course or document.
- The dialog shows the Training, Trainee and Current Due Date. Pick the New Due Date; it starts at the current due date, and the date picker won't offer an earlier one.
- Add a Reason for Extension (Optional). It is optional in the app, but an auditor will ask, so give one.
- Click Extend Due Date.
The confirmation reads “Due date extended to 2026-09-30”, and the person's training and team figures refresh straight away. What changes:
- The due date becomes the new date. Overdue training becomes open again, so the person may move from Non-Compliant to At Risk or Compliant, and the overdue alert clears the next time the page loads.
- For a course linked to a controlled document, the document training record moves to the same date, so the document doesn't show it as overdue either.
- For a course, a line is added to the assignment's Comments, for example [Due date changed 2026-09-09 -> 2026-09-30 by Mike Cook] Grace was on annual leave until 22 September. To read it, open the course's Trainees tab and open that trainee; it is in Comments. Earlier comments are kept. For document training assigned on its own the reason is not stored, because the record's notes belong to the trainee.
| Refusal | Why |
|---|---|
| “The new due date cannot be earlier than the current due date.” | Extending only gives more time. To bring a date forward, talk to the trainee rather than shortening it here. |
| “The new due date cannot be in the past.” | The new date must be today or later. A past date would make the training overdue again immediately. |
| “A valid new due date is required.” | The date field was cleared or incomplete. |
| “This training has no open assignment to extend.” | It was completed or excused before you saved. |
Excusing training
- Open the person's training and click the tick icon (Excuse Training) on the course.
- In Excuse Training, choose a Reason Type: On Leave, Medical, Job Transfer, Exemption or Other. It starts at On Leave.
- Add Notes (Optional): how long, who agreed, what should happen on their return.
- Read the note “This will mark the training as excused and remove it from the trainee's required training.” and click Excuse Training.
The confirmation reads “Training excused for <name>”. The course row now shows Excused with its actions greyed out, and the assignment's Comments gain a line such as [Excused 2026-09-15 by Mike Cook - Medical] followed by your notes. If the course is linked to a controlled document, the trainee's open training record for that document is withdrawn, so they are no longer asked to read it and it can't go overdue.
Document training can't be excused. On a document row the tick is greyed out (“Document training cannot be excused”), because a document training record has no excused state. Extend its due date instead, or ask whoever manages the document's training.
If the course is no longer open, you'll see “This training has no open assignment to excuse. Completed training cannot be excused.” A completed course is a real training record, and waiving it after the fact would rewrite history.
Excused is not completed, and it is not deleted. Marking the course completed would create a training record for training that never happened. Deleting it would lose the evidence of why it was waived. Excused keeps the assignment and the reason, and takes the course out of what is required.
What excused means elsewhere
| Where | Effect |
|---|---|
| My Team Training | Left out of Total Assigned, the completion rate and the status, so it can no longer make someone At Risk or Non-Compliant. The row stays visible, marked Excused. |
| Reminders and overdue emails | None are sent for it, manually or automatically. |
| Renewals | For a recurring course, the daily automatic renewal skips this trainee while their latest assignment is excused. Bulk Renewal still lists them with the status Excused, not ticked, so a coordinator can reassign on purpose. See Processing Bulk Training Renewals. |
| Training roles | If the role requires the course, it is still missing for that role, shown as excused by a supervisor. Assign Missing Training skips it rather than handing it straight back. See Setting Up Training Roles and Compliance. |
| Compliance Dashboard | Excused assignments are left out of its figures, and out of the compliance scheduled report, because they are not required. See Regulatory Requirements and the Compliance Dashboard. |
| Certificates | None: there is no completion to certify. |
Lifting an excusal
There is no un-excuse button. When the person is back and should do the course, assign it again: use Assign Training on their training, or reassign from Bulk Renewal for a recurring course. A new assignment is created with a new due date (and a new document training record, for a course linked to a document), and from then on the excusal no longer applies: the course counts again, renews again and can be reminded about. The excused assignment stays on record. See Assigning Training to Your Team.
Availability and permissions
- Requires the Training module. My Team is available to the Admin, Training Coordinator and Supervisor roles.
- You can extend and excuse for your own team members. Admins and training coordinators may do so for any trainee.
Things to know
- It applies to the course, not the row. If the person has the same course open more than once, all of those open assignments are extended or excused together.
- A renewal can't be extended or excused. A Renewal Due row has nothing assigned yet; assign the course to set a date.
- Excusing a document-linked course and role requirements: if a training role requires the document itself (not the course), Assign Missing Training on that role can assign the document again, because its record was withdrawn.
- Missing a training session is different. To excuse someone from a scheduled session, mark them excused in the session's attendance; excused bookings don't take a place. See Taking Attendance.
- Extensions and excusals are auditable. Every one is signed with your name and date in the assignment's comments. Auditors look for patterns, such as the same person extended every month, so use them for genuine reasons and tell the trainee the new date in person as well.