The product
Six screens, and what each one is for
What an instructor running a ROTC unit touches in a normal week, screen by screen. Each one below is drawn by the same stylesheet the application uses, with a fictional unit’s data in it. Nothing here is a concept or a roadmap item. If it is on this page, it is built.
Roster
The roster is the record, not a copy of it
Most units keep the real roster in a spreadsheet and retype it into three other places - the awards board packet, the inspection binder, the substitute’s copy. Every retype is a chance for the four versions to disagree, and by February they always do.
Here there is one record per Cadet, and the roster is a view of those records rather than a document derived from them. Course level, grade, rank, contact details and placement live on the Cadet. Change a Cadet’s placement and every roster they appear on, plus the printed copy, changes with it, because they were never separate lists.
Cadets who leave are dropped rather than deleted. A dropped Cadet comes off the working roster but keeps their record and their history, so a Cadet who transfers out in October and comes back in January is reinstated rather than re-entered.
- Per Cadet
- Course level, grade, rank, contact details, placement
- Working with it
- Search, filter, sort, export, print for inspection
- Leaving
- Drop and reinstate - the record and its history survive
| Cadet | Rank | Course | Placement | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alvarez, R. | C/Capt | AS 400 | HQ - Operations | Active |
| Boateng, K. | C/CMSgt | AS 400 | Alpha Sq - 1st Flt | Active |
| Castellanos, M. | C/MSgt | AS 300 | Alpha Sq - 2nd Flt | Active |
| Dunne, P. | C/TSgt | AS 300 | Bravo Sq - 1st Flt | Pending |
| Ferreira, J. | C/SSgt | AS 200 | Bravo Sq - 2nd Flt | Active |
| Grady, S. | C/SSgt | AS 200 | Alpha Sq - 1st Flt | Active |
| Ikeda, N. | C/SrA | AS 200 | HQ - Personnel | Active |
| Okonkwo, D. | C/A1C | AS 100 | Bravo Sq - 1st Flt | Active |
| Prentice, A. | C/A1C | AS 100 | Alpha Sq - 2nd Flt | Pending |
| Whitfield, T. | C/AB | AS 100 | Unassigned | Dropped |
Unit structure
Your structure, in your branch's words
Build the unit as it actually stands - a battalion of companies and platoons, or a group of squadrons and flights - nested however deep your programme goes. A Cadet is placed at a point in that tree, and the tree is what the rest of the system counts against.
The vocabulary follows your service. An Air Force unit is not asked to call its flights platoons, and a Navy unit is not told it has companies when the roll is under 150 and it should not. An instructor who has to translate every label in their head is doing the software’s job for it.
Structures change mid-year - two under-strength platoons merge, a company stands up for drill season. Moving a formation takes its Cadets with it rather than orphaning them.
- Levels
- Whatever your programme uses - see the branch reference
- Naming
- Your branch's own terminology throughout
- Placement
- One Cadet, one place in the tree
- Group HQ128 CadetsGroup
- Headquarters Flight14 CadetsFlight
- Alpha Squadron61 CadetsSquadron
- 1st Flight32 CadetsFlight
- 1st Element11 CadetsElement
- 2nd Element10 CadetsElement
- 2nd Flight29 CadetsFlight
- Bravo Squadron53 CadetsSquadron
Chain of command
Permissions belong to the billet, not the person
Define the staff and command positions your unit runs, then assign Cadets into them. What a Cadet can do comes from the position they hold, not from a permission set attached to them personally.
That distinction matters every May. When the Cadet in the personnel billet graduates and a junior takes it over, the access moves with the billet. There is no list of individual permissions to audit and nobody keeps rights they no longer need because someone forgot to revoke them.
The grants are narrow on purpose. A Cadet holding the personnel billet can maintain the roster without also being able to change the unit structure or approve their own promotion. And every position is scoped to its own unit - there is no configuration in which a Cadet can see another school’s unit.
- Held by
- A Cadet, or nobody - vacant is a valid state
- Grants
- Attached to the position, inherited on assignment
- Boundary
- Always scoped to the holder’s own unit
- Group CommanderC/Lt Col Alvarez, R.
- View all Cadets
- Approve requests
- Assign positions
- Personnel (IM)C/Maj Boateng, K.
- Edit roster
- Submit promotions
- Operations (OPS)Vacant
- Create taskings
- Assign taskings
Taskings
Work assigned to a billet still has an owner in September
Taskings sit on a board with checklists, due dates and an overdue flag. That part is unremarkable and works the way you would expect.
The part worth knowing is that a tasking can be assigned to a position rather than a named Cadet. “Logistics inventories the drill rifles” stays assigned to whoever holds that billet. When the billet changes hands the recurring work goes with it, instead of following a Cadet who graduated eighteen months ago.
Overdue is computed, not flagged by hand. Nothing here depends on an instructor remembering to check a list on a Friday afternoon.
- Assign to
- A named Cadet, or a position
- On a tasking
- Checklist, due date, status
- Overdue
- Derived from the due date, not set manually
Not started2
Inventory drill rifles
Logistics (LG)
Due Fri
Book buses for Veterans Day
C/Capt Alvarez
Due 8 Nov
In progress2
Collect uniform sizes
Personnel (IM)
2 days over
Draft awards board memo
C/Maj Boateng
Due Mon
Complete1
Submit Cadet count
Personnel (IM)
Closed 12 Oct
Approval queue
Cadets propose. You dispose.
This is the part that makes handing the roster to a Cadet staff survivable, and it is the thing the product is actually built around.
A Cadet in a staff position does not write to the roster. They submit a request, and it waits. You see the current value next to the proposed one, field by field, so reviewing a promotion takes about four seconds and does not require you to remember what the rank was before. Approve it and it applies. Deny it and the roster is untouched. Either way the Cadet is told.
Once a Cadet has earned it, a position can be granted the ability to skip the queue entirely and write directly. That is a deliberate decision you make per position, not a default - so delegation is something you extend, rather than something you discover has already happened.
- Submitted by
- Any Cadet holding a position with the grant
- Shown as
- Current value beside proposed value, per field
- Outcome
- Applied on approve, discarded on deny, Cadet notified
- Bypass
- Grantable per position, off unless you turn it on
- Rank
- C/MSgtC/2d Lt
- Position
- Flight Sergeant, 2nd FltFlight Commander, 2nd Flt
Change history
The answer to “who moved my Cadet?”
Every change is recorded: what changed, who changed it, when, and what the value was before. Administrator actions are logged the same way as everyone else’s.
The reason to care is not audit theatre. It is the parent phone call in March asking why their Cadet was passed over for a promotion in November, and the difference between “I believe it was a placement conflict” and opening the record and reading them the date.
- Recorded
- Field, previous value, new value, actor, timestamp
- Covers
- Instructor, Cadet and administrator actions alike
14 Oct, 09:41
Approved promotion for Castellanos, M.
MSgt Reyes (instructor) · Rank C/MSgt → C/2d Lt
14 Oct, 09:38
Submitted promotion request
C/Maj Boateng (IM) · Awaiting approval
11 Oct, 15:02
Moved Dunne, P. to Bravo Sq - 1st Flt
MSgt Reyes (instructor) · Previously Alpha Sq - 2nd Flt
02 Oct, 08:20
Whitfield, T. marked dropped
System · Reason: transferred school
Straight answer
What this does not do
An earlier version of this site advertised three things the software had never had. They are listed here instead, because you will find out in week two either way and it is cheaper for both of us if you find out now.
Operation order management
Never built. It appeared on the old feature list as a placeholder and was never anything more than that.
Analytics and reporting
There are no dashboards or trend reports. You can export the roster and take it to a spreadsheet, which is what units do today.
Training resources
No curriculum, lesson plans or training library. This holds your unit’s records; it does not teach the course.
If one of these is the thing you actually need, this is not the right tool yet, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a first year you spend working around it.
Put your own unit in it
Building the structure and bringing a roster across is an afternoon’s work. The first year is free for up to 50 Cadets, and there is no card to enter before you start.