Absence Analyzer
Bradford Factor scores from your absence records, with what the formula is actually doing shown before your own numbers are.
Reads .xlsx and .csv inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
A score is a reason to have a conversation
A Bradford Factor is not a finding about anybody’s commitment. It squares the number of separate absences, so it lands hardest on people whose health produces frequent short ones, and it gives its best scores to people who come in sick. This tool computes the number, shows what the square is doing, and stops there. Deciding what a score means about a particular person is a judgement about that person and their circumstances, and no spreadsheet is in a position to make it.
What the formula does before you give it anything
Ten days off, taken three different ways. The days lost are identical in every row.
A hundredfold spread for the same amount of work missed. The square is the formula’s entire opinion, and it is an opinion rather than a measurement.
The absence records
Drop a spreadsheet here
One row per absence, or one row per absent day. Either works, but the tool has to be told which.
The square is the formula’s entire opinion
Bradford is the number of separate absences squared, times the total days lost. Ten days in one stretch scores 10. The same ten days as five two-day absences scores 250. As ten single days it scores 1,000. Identical time missed, a hundredfold spread in the number.
That is deliberate. The formula was built on the belief that frequent short absences disrupt an organization more than one long one, which is a defensible belief. It is a belief rather than a measurement, and the number carries it whether or not anybody using the number agrees with it.
Absences, not rows
The most common way to get a wildly wrong score is arithmetic rather than judgement. If your file holds one row per absent day and each row is counted as a separate absence, a fortnight off becomes ten absences instead of one and the score comes out a hundred times too high. Consecutive days are merged here, and the number of rows folded together is reported, because that is where the answer came from.
A Friday and the following Monday is the same question in miniature. Almost every scheme treats them as one absence. Treating them as two roughly quadruples the score for exactly the same time off, so the setting is there and the tool says which way it went.
Trigger points are conventions, not standards
Fifty, 125, 200 and 500 all appear in real absence policies. Nothing published sets any of them, organizations use wildly different ones, and the same person moves across several depending only on which absences are counted and whether weekends bridge. The tool shows how many people sit above each, and says plainly that they are conventions.
Deciding what to leave out is your job, not the tool’s
Most organizations that use this exclude some categories of absence from the count. This tool cannot tell which absences those are and will not guess. What it does is make excluding them a first-class part of the calculation: mark a reason and every score recomputes, with the unexcluded figure kept beside it so the effect of the choice is visible rather than buried.
A score built from three years is not a score built from one
Bradford is normally read over a rolling twelve months. A file covering several years produces much larger numbers that are not comparable with anything, and the tool raises that as a problem rather than quietly handing you the figure.