# A Number We Made Worse

We changed how Handee scored on-time completion, and the score went down.

- 29 July 2026
- Aditya Kannan & Piotr Gospodarczyk

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This release of Handee, the compliance system we built for multi-site property operations, changed how one of its own numbers was calculated. The number went down.

Nothing about the underlying work got worse. The old figure had been flattering us since the first release, and this week we stopped it.

## A number that could only go up

Handee reported an operator's on-time completion rate, the share of finished jobs that landed on or before the date they were due. Until this week it was measured against the first time a job was marked complete.

There was a reason for that, and it was not a good one. Until this week there was no way to record that a job had come back. A completion was final by construction, so the first one was the only one there was.

The code was doing exactly what it had been told to do. A rule that stops counting at the first success can only ever produce good news, which is why a supplier writes one without noticing.

## What the old number was hiding

When a contractor's work failed and somebody had to send them back, the second visit had to be recorded somewhere. With no way to reopen the original job, the only place to put it was a new work order.

So the system held two jobs. Both completed. Both, quite possibly, inside their due dates.

The failure had become an additional success, and the operator's completion figures improved in proportion to how badly the work had been done.

The release kept rework on the original work order, with a mandatory reason for why it came back, and scored on-time completion against the final completion rather than the first. It also added a figure that had nowhere to live before, the share of finished work that was never sent back at all.

Operators would see their on-time rate fall. We would rather have explained that in advance than let somebody find a number that dropped overnight and wonder what else moved.

## Shipping the denominator

Every number we added in this release shipped beside a plain statement of what it could not see.

The rate for work fixed first time was published with the three blind spots that inflated it, one of which was that a job sent back to a different contractor never appeared in it at all. The ratio of reactive to planned maintenance was published with the share of jobs it was able to classify, because work raised before this release carried no classification and we did not invent one for it. Supplier concentration was published with a count of the awards that carried no value, so that unpriced work could not be read as absent work. A count of status changes with no recorded actor sat on the dashboard as a data-integrity signal, which was a polite way of saying that some of our own history was thinner than we would have liked.

None of this made the product look better.

A figure that arrives alongside a list of its own exclusions is a figure somebody has to think about, and a dashboard full of those is harder to sell than one full of large green percentages.

A number without a denominator is decoration that happens to be numeric, and an operations lead who acts on it is making a decision we misled them into.

## Why any of this should matter to you

If you are choosing who to hand part of your operation to, every candidate will show you a dashboard, and the dashboards will look much the same. They will all be green.

The useful question is what those numbers were measured against, and what the supplier did on the day the honest answer turned out to be inconvenient. Whether they have ever moved a metric in a direction that cost them something. Whether they will tell you what a figure cannot see before you have relied on it, rather than after.

The number we promise clients is the human time recovered on the work they hand us. A promise like that is only worth something from people who will also tell you when one of their own numbers was wrong.

Handee was retired on 30 August 2026.

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