Recurring items — how scheduling works

Actions, inspections, and meetings can all recur — a monthly site walkthrough, a quarterly committee, a weekly toolbox talk. SteadyOn handles all three the same way, on one shared scheduling spine. This page explains the model so the buttons make sense.

One occurrence at a time

SteadyOn does not pre-fill a calendar with twelve future meetings. Instead, a recurring item is a series with exactly one live occurrence at a time. The next one is created when you close the current one — by marking it held (or completed), or by skipping it.

Why held-driven, not calendar-driven? Pre-creating future occurrences sounds convenient until reality drifts — a meeting slips a week, an inspection is skipped, the cadence changes. You then have a calendar full of stale entries to clean up. Advancing the series only when you actually close an occurrence keeps the schedule honest: what you see is what’s really next.

Frequency and basis

When you set up recurrence you choose two things:

Frequency — how often it repeats (daily, weekly, monthly, and so on).
Basis — how the next date is calculated:
- Anchor — the cadence is pinned to the original scheduled date. A “first Tuesday of the month” item stays on the first Tuesday even if one month ran late.
- Recent — the next date counts forward from the day you actually closed the last one. Use this when the gap matters more than the calendar slot (“every 90 days from when it was last done”).

When you close an occurrence, a Schedule next dialog shows the computed next date. You can accept it, override it, or choose not to repeat again — which ends the series there.

Occurrences, predecessors, and successors

Each occurrence knows its position in the series — occurrence #4 — and links to the one before and after it. Stepping through those links gives you the full history: every meeting you’ve held, every inspection you’ve run, in order.

When the next occurrence is created, the current one is superseded — it stays on record (with its minutes, results, or notes intact) but is no longer the live one.

Skip vs cancel

Two different things can happen to a recurring item:

Skip — this occurrence didn’t go ahead, but the series should continue. SteadyOn records the skip and schedules the next one.
Cancel / end series — stop the whole thing repeating. No further occurrences are created. Past occurrences stay on record.

Where it shows up

A recurring item’s detail page shows a Recurring occurrence #N line with Previous and Next links, and its meta strip shows the Repeat frequency (marked ended once the series is stopped). The list views flag recurring items so you can tell a one-off from a series.