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Compliance Calendar and Escalations (Pro)

Pro gives you two tools for keeping ahead of compliance deadlines. The Compliance Calendar shows, on a calendar, when acknowledgements will expire and when document reviews fall due. Acknowledgement escalation emails the document owner, and then a nominated escalation manager, when an expired acknowledgement on a high-stakes document still hasn’t been renewed after the usual reminders.

🔒 Pro feature — requires the Pro plugin.

Part 1 — The Compliance Calendar

What the calendar is for

The calendar is a planning view. It helps compliance leads, practice managers and auditors answer questions like “how many renewals are coming up in July?” or “which policies are due for review before our accreditation visit?” — without exporting a spreadsheet.

It shows two kinds of event:

Acknowledgement expiry — the dates people’s acknowledgements of a document run out, grouped by document, with the number of people expiring that day.
Document review due — the next review date set on each published document.

Events come straight from your existing data. You never add or edit events on the calendar itself.

Where to find the calendar

Go to Policy Management → Calendar. The page heading is Compliance Calendar, with the description “Upcoming acknowledgement expiry dates and document review due dates.”

Who can see it

Anyone who can view the plugin’s reports — by default Administrators and the Policy Auditor role. Editors, Authors, Contributors and Subscribers don’t see the menu item, and opening the page directly shows “You do not have permission to view this page.”

The calendar is read-only for everyone. Clicking a document opens its edit screen, where normal editing permissions apply.

Using the calendar

Open Policy Management → Calendar. It opens on the current month.
Choose a view with the Month, Year or List tabs.
Use the previous and next arrows to move one month at a time (or one year at a time in Year view).
Narrow what’s shown with the filters (see below).
Click a highlighted day to open a pop-up listing that day’s events. Close it with Close, by clicking outside it, or with the Escape key.

The legend at the top tells the two event types apart: Acknowledgement expiry and Document review due.

Month view

A standard month grid, starting on the day set in Settings → General → Week Starts On. Today is highlighted. Days with events show a coloured dot for each event type. Click a day to open the pop-up, which lists:

Acknowledgement Expiry — each document with acknowledgements expiring that day, followed by the number of people, for example “Infection Control Policy — 12 user(s)”.
Document Review Due — each document whose review falls on that day.

Each document title opens the document’s edit screen in a new tab.

If nothing falls in the month, you’ll see “No compliance events this month.” with a View Document Compliance button that takes you to the per-document dashboard.

Year view

Twelve small month grids for the whole year. Days are shaded by event type (acknowledgement expiry, review due, or both). Click a shaded day, or tab to it and press Enter, to open the same pop-up.

List view

A table of the current month’s events in date order, with the columns Date, Document, Type (Ack Expiry or Review Due) and Details (the number of people for acknowledgement expiries). This view suits printing or copying into a meeting agenda. If there’s nothing to show, it reads “No events found for this period.”

Filtering the calendar

Filter	What it does	Default	Allowed values
Role	Shows only acknowledgement expiries for people who held this role when they acknowledged. It doesn’t affect review-due events.	All roles	Any role on your site
Category	Shows only documents in the selected document categories. Applies to both event types.	None selected (all)	One or more categories. Hold Ctrl/⌘ to select several.
Tag	Shows only documents with the selected document tags. Applies to both event types.	None selected (all)	One or more tags. Hold Ctrl/⌘ to select several.

The Category and Tag filters only appear when your site has document categories or tags. If you choose both a category and a tag, a document must match both to appear. The calendar refreshes as soon as you change a filter.

Where the dates come from

Acknowledgement expiry dates are set when someone acknowledges a document, based on that document’s expiry settings (a number of days, a fixed annual date, or a renewal schedule — see The Acknowledgement System). Acknowledgements without an expiry date never appear.
Review due dates come from each published document’s Next Review Date. Drafts and documents without a next review date don’t appear. You can set missing review dates from the Document Compliance dashboard (see Per-Document Compliance Dashboard).

Calendar limits

Short delay. To keep the page fast, results for each month and filter combination are reused for up to 5 minutes. A review date you’ve just changed may take a few minutes to appear.
500-document limit per period. Up to 500 review-due documents are shown for a single month or year, and the category and tag filters consider up to 500 documents.
Dates are calendar days. Expiry events are grouped by date only; the calendar doesn’t show times.
No feeds. There is no export to Outlook, Google Calendar or iCal.

Part 2 — Acknowledgement escalation

What escalation does

The Free plugin already reminds staff before their acknowledgement expires and, depending on the document’s risk rating, keeps reminding them after it has expired. Pro adds escalation for the cases where those reminders aren’t working:

Document owner. After a set number of days overdue, the owner of the document receives an email listing the people who are overdue on it.
Escalation manager. After a longer period, one nominated person — typically your Quality or Compliance Manager — receives a single summary email covering every document that has reached that stage.

“Overdue” here means a person’s acknowledgement has passed its expiry date and they haven’t renewed it.

Which documents escalate

Escalation depends on the Risk Rating set on each document (in the document’s governance details).

Risk Rating	Email to the document owner	Email to the escalation manager
Critical	7 days overdue	14 days overdue
High	14 days overdue	Never
Medium	Never	Never
Low	Never	Never
— Unrated —	Never	Never

Medium, Low and unrated documents rely on Free’s reminders alone. These thresholds are fixed in the settings screen; if you need different numbers, ask your developer, who can change them for your site.

Setting up escalation

Give each high-stakes document a Risk Rating of Critical or High on its edit screen.
Make sure each of those documents has a Document Owner with a working email address. If a document has no owner, the owner email is skipped for that document.
Go to Policy Management → Settings → Acknowledgements & Notifications.
In the Reminders & Schedules section, find Escalation Manager and choose your compliance lead.
Click Save Changes.

Setting	What it does	Default	Allowed values
Escalation Manager	The one person who receives the manager-level escalation summary.	— No escalation manager — (the manager email is switched off)	Any user who can manage acknowledgements — by default, Administrators

If you pick someone who can’t manage acknowledgements (for example, after their role changes), the setting is cleared back to no escalation manager when you save. Owner emails still go out without an escalation manager.

The acknowledgement system itself must be switched on. If Enable Acknowledgement System is turned off in your settings, no escalations are sent.

When escalations are sent

Escalation runs once a day, as part of the same daily job that sends Free’s acknowledgement reminders, straight after the reminders go out. Each step is sent once per person, per document, per expiry: once Jo’s acknowledgement of a Critical policy has been escalated to the owner, it isn’t escalated to the owner again for that same expiry. When Jo renews and the new acknowledgement later expires, escalation starts afresh.

Only acknowledgements that expired within roughly the last year are considered.

Escalation emails

Both emails are sent through WordPress’s normal email system, using the sender name and address in your plugin’s email settings (under System Configuration). They’re HTML emails.

Email	When	Recipient	Subject
Owner escalation	A Critical document reaches 7 days overdue, or a High document reaches 14 days, for one or more people	The document owner	“[Your site name] Overdue acknowledgements need your attention: Document title“
Manager escalation	A Critical document reaches 14 days overdue for one or more people	The Escalation Manager	“[Your site name] 3 overdue acknowledgements escalated to you” (the number varies)

The owner email greets the owner by name, explains that reminders haven’t resolved the overdue acknowledgements on a document they own, lists each person with how many days overdue they are, and links to the acknowledgements register. One email is sent per document.

The manager email is a single summary per day: a table with Document, User, Risk and Overdue columns for everything that has newly passed the manager threshold, and a link to the Compliance Overview.

Data and privacy

The escalation emails contain document titles and the display names of overdue staff, so choose your escalation manager with care. The plugin keeps a small internal record of which escalations it has already sent, so it doesn’t repeat them, and clears entries older than 120 days. Nothing else is stored.

Without an active Pro licence

On a Free-only site, there’s no Compliance Calendar and no escalation. Free’s reminders to staff continue as normal.
If your licence lapses and the 7-day grace period ends, Policy Management → Calendar shows “This is a Pro feature” with an Activate your licence button. Escalation emails stop and the Escalation Manager setting disappears from the settings screen. Your saved escalation manager is kept and takes effect again once you reactivate. See Licence and Updates.

Limits and edge cases

Only expired acknowledgements escalate. Escalation is triggered by an acknowledgement passing its expiry date. Someone who has never acknowledged a document has no expiry date, so they aren’t escalated — use the Acknowledgements screen, the Document Compliance dashboard, or the scheduled compliance report to chase people who haven’t acknowledged at all.
One escalation manager per site. You can’t nominate different managers for different departments.
Waivers. Escalation works from expired acknowledgement records and doesn’t check the Waiver Register. If a person on a waiver previously acknowledged and that acknowledgement has since expired, they can still appear in escalation emails.
Changing a document’s risk rating takes effect from the next daily run.

Troubleshooting

The calendar says “Could not load calendar events. Please refresh the page.” The page couldn’t fetch its data, usually because your login session expired or a security plugin blocked the request. Refresh the page; if it keeps happening, log out and back in, or ask your host whether the WordPress REST API is being blocked.

A document’s review date isn’t on the calendar. Check that the document is published and has a Next Review Date, and that the category, tag or role filters aren’t hiding it. Recent changes can take up to 5 minutes to appear.

Owners aren’t receiving escalation emails. Check that the document is rated Critical or High, that it has an owner with a valid email address, and that the person has been overdue long enough (7 or 14 days). Escalation also needs your site’s daily scheduled tasks to run. On low-traffic sites WordPress’s scheduler only runs when someone visits, so ask your host to set up a real server cron job. Finally, confirm that your site can send email — a transactional email plugin is recommended.

The escalation manager isn’t receiving anything. Only Critical documents reach the manager, at 14 days overdue. Check that Escalation Manager is still set: if the person lost permission to manage acknowledgements, the setting was cleared the next time settings were saved.

Worked example: a registered training organisation

Coastline Training Institute is an RTO preparing for an audit against the 2025 Standards for RTOs. Its Critical Incident Response Policy is rated Critical, and its Assessment Policy is rated High. Both require trainers to re-acknowledge every 12 months.

Planning with the calendar. In January, the compliance officer opens Policy Management → Calendar, switches to Year view and sees a cluster of shaded days in late March: 40 trainers acknowledged the Assessment Policy at last year’s induction, so they all expire together. She filters by the Trainer role and switches to List view for March to get a table for the next staff meeting. She also spots that the Critical Incident Response Policy’s review is due on 15 April, two weeks before the audit, and moves it earlier.

Escalation in action. On 28 March, 40 Assessment Policy acknowledgements expire. Free’s reminders go out to the trainers, and most renew within the week. On 11 April — 14 days overdue — the Head of Training, who owns the policy, receives “[Coastline Training Institute] Overdue acknowledgements need your attention: Assessment Policy”, listing the five trainers still outstanding. Because the Assessment Policy is High rather than Critical, it never goes to the escalation manager.

Meanwhile, two trainers are 14 days overdue on the Critical Incident Response Policy. The owner was emailed at 7 days. Now the Quality Manager, nominated as Escalation Manager, receives a one-line-per-person summary and follows up with each trainer directly before the auditor arrives.

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