Platoon Manager
You have been handed accountability for people you do not know yet, using a system somebody else built. The instinct is to rebuild it. Do that in week four, not week one.
Week one: find out what the real record is
There is the roster you were given, and there is the one people actually use. Sometimes it is a group chat. Sometimes it is one squad leader's notebook. Find it before you change anything, because that is the one that is current.
Ask each squad leader how they find out a soldier will be out tomorrow. The answers will not match. That mismatch is your actual problem, and it is rarely the one described in the handover.
Week two: reconcile once, properly
Sit down with the roster and every source of absence you can find, and get them to agree for a single day. Not a month. One day.
Expect to find people who have been marked out for longer than their leave was approved, and people counted present who have been at school for three weeks. Both are normal in a roster nobody has closed out. You cannot fix the habit until you have one clean day to measure drift against.
Week three: fix the moment of entry
By now you know where the record goes stale. It is nearly always the gap between somebody approving an absence and somebody recording it.
Shorten that gap before you touch anything else. Whoever approves it records it, with dates, at the time. If that means the record has to be reachable from a phone in a motor pool, then that is a requirement of the system, not a nice feature.
Week four: now change the tooling, if you still want to
With one clean day and a fixed entry point, you can tell whether the spreadsheet is the problem or the habits were. Often the habits were, and the spreadsheet is fine.
If you do move to something else, move the return dates first. A tool that holds absences as dated windows will keep itself current. One that holds status words will need the same discipline the spreadsheet needed, and you will be back here in six months.
Two things worth doing whatever you use
Clear yesterday's marks overnight, so nobody starts the morning trusting a stale count. And keep completed absences as history rather than deleting them, because the first time a commander asks how often a soldier has been unaccounted for, the answer is either in that history or it does not exist.
Related
Get your one clean day
The hardest part of taking over a roster is the first reconciliation. Platoon Manager gives you one place to do it, a history that does not get deleted, and marks that clear themselves overnight. Start with one platoon and see where the drift is.