Help centre · HR
Bradford Factor
Open this screen in Saral/hr/reports/bradford
The absence report that flags a pattern rather than a volume: each worker's Bradford score is the number of separate sickness spells squared, times the days absent, over a rolling window — so five one-day absences score 125 and one 25-day illness scores 25. Workers are banded Review, High and Critical at the thresholds your leave policy sets, with the highest scores charted against those lines and every worker in the table below.
You enter
- The rolling window — 6, 12 or 24 months back from today.
- A band to show — all workers, or Critical, High, Review or OK only; a tile does the same.
Saral fills in
- Each worker's spells, total days and score, from sickness and medical absences in the leave register (never holiday, maternity or unpaid leave), with days the worker was not due in merged into one spell when the policy says so.
- The band for each score, in the thresholds from HR → Settings → Leave & Absence — 100, 200 and 400 unless your account changed them — and a count per band in the tiles.
- The recent absences behind each score, as dated chips, and a link to the worker's record.
It produces
- An Excel export of the rows on screen with the score as a live formula over spells and days, or the same workbook emailed from the report.
What this page is for
A plain day-count misses the pattern that disrupts a team most: the worker who is off for a day, often. The Bradford Factor weights frequency over length, so it is the first place to look before a conversation about attendance. It is a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict — a score says nothing about why someone was ill, and the leave register and the worker's record hold the detail behind it.
What counts
Only sickness and medical absences from the leave register count — a Bradford score over maternity leave or holiday would be nonsense. A spell is one continuous absence; when the policy merges non-working days (the default), a sick Thursday and the Tuesday after a bank-holiday weekend are one spell, because the worker was not due in between. The window runs back from today in months of thirty days, and a spell belongs to the window it starts in.
One calculation, two screens
Until 2026-09 this report and the leave register's Summary tab scored differently — one over a calendar year with its own thresholds — so the same label meant two numbers. Both now read lib/hr/bradford.ts: the report over a rolling window with an export, the Summary's Absence tab over the leave year, in the same bands. A score here matches the score beside the worker on Leave.
Where the settings live
The Review, High and Critical thresholds and whether spells merge across non-working days are HR → Settings → Leave & Absence. The absence types and their names are on the same tab. The window and the band chosen here are view state, kept in the URL for this screen only.
Next screen: /hr/expenses
Not what you needed? Inside Saral, ask Kuku (Alt+K) — if it cannot answer, “Ask a human” sends the question to Saral support with the chat attached.