Release 1.5 of Handee, the compliance system we build for multi-site property operations, added nothing to what the product does. Same screens, same reports, same speed as last week.
What it did ship: the legal documents a buyer's compliance team asks for, a rule that deletes former users from our records without anyone having to remember to do it, and repairs to a menu that shut out anyone who cannot use a mouse.
None of that will ever appear on a sales slide.
The work nobody chases you for
If a page is slow, somebody raises a ticket. If a feature is missing, somebody says so during a demo. This kind of work generates neither, so it can be deferred indefinitely without anyone noticing.
Take the menu. Handee's side navigation could be operated perfectly well with a mouse, and could not be operated properly by anyone using a keyboard alone or a screen reader. Sections announced themselves as unlabelled buttons. Closed menus still swallowed the cursor, so the focus disappeared into items that were not on screen.
If a member of your facilities team uses assistive technology, they could not have done their job in our product. And we would not have heard about it. Someone in that position does not raise a ticket with a supplier they have no relationship with. They abandon the trial, or they ask a colleague to do the work for them, and the operator who bought the software never learns why one person on the team stopped using it.
Our own testing said everything was fine. It was checking that the right things appeared on the page, which they did. Appearing on the page and being usable are different questions, and only one of them was being asked.
Deletion that happens whether or not we remember
Every supplier's privacy policy says they do not keep personal data longer than necessary. Almost none of them tell you what actually removes it, or when.
Ours does it on a timer. Ninety days after an account is closed, the person's name, email address and login credentials are wiped from our records automatically. The account's history stays, because your work orders and invoices have to keep making sense to an auditor three years from now, but the person is no longer in there.
A promise in a policy holds for as long as somebody keeps doing the work by hand, and hand work is the first thing dropped in a busy quarter. A rule on a timer survives the busy quarter, which is when anyone is likely to test it.
Knowing what you actually agreed to
Accepting our terms is now mandatory when you register, and we record the moment you did it and the version of the document you accepted.
The version is the useful part, and it constrains us more than it constrains you. Plenty of suppliers can prove you ticked a box. Far fewer can tell you which wording was behind it, which leaves them free to revise the text and treat old agreements as though they had covered the new version. Change our document and the version number changes with it, and your account keeps the number you agreed to.
We also published the data processing agreement and the full list of the companies that touch customer data, readable before you sign up rather than after your legal review has spent a fortnight asking for it. The customer-facing version of all this is on the Handee site.
Why we gave it a release of its own
We could have spread this work across the next three releases and let it travel alongside things customers were waiting for. That is the normal approach, and it is how work like this never finishes. It sits at the bottom of a list whose top item is a customer commitment, and the release ships with the bottom item still open.
Giving it a release of its own removed the competition for the time.
If you are choosing who to hand part of your operation to, every candidate will tell you what their software does. A more useful question is what they do when nobody is watching and nobody is asking. The number we promise clients is the human time recovered on the work they hand us, and that promise only means something coming from people who also do the parts of the job that never get noticed.