How monitoring works
Most compliance tools answer one question: is this person's paperwork in order today? Oho answers a harder one: has anything changed since you last looked?
That difference is the whole product, and it comes down to Oho asking the register more than once. This page explains the two moments a check happens, who decides how often, and what you actually see when an answer changes.
Two different moments
| The first check | Every check after | |
|---|---|---|
| When | The moment a credential lands on a worker | On the schedule you set |
| What it establishes | Where this person stands today | Whether that's still true |
| What triggers it | Adding, importing, or a worker submitting a credential | Nothing — Oho does it on its own |
| You see | An outcome, usually in seconds | A change, if there is one |
The first check needs no asking: however a credential arrived — typed in, imported from a spreadsheet, submitted through a Recruitment Check — Oho verifies it against the register straight away. That's your baseline.
Everything after that is monitoring, and it's the part that catches what a one-off check can't: a clearance suspended three months into someone's employment, a registration that lapsed quietly, a card cancelled without anyone telling you.
A card that was valid when you hired someone tells you about the day you hired them. Suspensions, cancellations and expiries all happen after onboarding — which is exactly when nobody is looking. Monitoring is how you find out in days rather than at the next audit.
Who sets the cadence
Partly you, partly Oho — and it's worth knowing which is which.
You set the schedule, per register, in the Verification Sources tab. Each Verification Source connects Oho to one authority — the Victorian WWC register, AHPRA, Blue Card Services — and carries its own schedule, so a high-stakes register can be swept more often than a slower-moving one.
Oho sets a floor on how often a register is asked about the same credential. A result is treated as current for a set window, and a scan inside that window reuses it rather than troubling the register again:
| Credential | Re-checked no more often than |
|---|---|
| Most credentials | Daily |
| AHPRA registrations | Weekly |
| Police checks | Monthly |
Those windows exist because the registers aren't ours. Several are scraped pages behind a captcha, and hammering one every hour across a large workforce is both slow and a good way to get blocked. The windows are set platform-wide rather than per organisation.
The practical upshot: setting a source to sweep hourly won't get you hourly answers. It will get you a fresh answer as soon as the window is up.
One thing to watch: a source with no schedule doesn't monitor. The first check still runs, so the credential looks answered — but nothing asks again, and it can sit green indefinitely because no one has re-checked it.
What happens between checks
Monitoring is a series of checks, not a live feed. That distinction is the single most important thing to understand about it, because it decides what Oho can and can't tell you at any given moment.
A credential's status is the answer to the last check Oho ran, not the state of the register right now. If a clearance is revoked the day after a scan, Oho goes on showing the previous answer until the next scan asks again. Nothing is wrong when that happens — it is what a scheduled check is.
Two things set how long that gap can be:
- Your schedule, per verification source. A source swept daily has a shorter gap than one swept weekly.
- Oho's minimum re-check window — daily for most credentials, weekly for AHPRA, monthly for police checks. A scan inside the window reuses the last answer rather than asking the register again, so a schedule more frequent than the window doesn't shorten the gap.
The longer of the two wins. Sweeping a source hourly still gets you a once-daily answer for most credentials, and a once-monthly answer for police checks.
The exception
NSW pushes changes to Oho. For that register, a status change can reach you between scheduled checks rather than waiting for the next one. Every other register is asked, not told — see Where monitoring behaves differently.
What this means in practice
- Treat a green status as "was true when last checked", not "is true now." The credential's page shows when it was last checked; that date is the honest answer to how current it is.
- Don't rely on the gap being short for police checks. A monthly floor means up to a month can pass between answers, whatever your schedule says.
- Where you need certainty at a specific moment — before a placement, before an audit — run a check on demand from the credential's page rather than reading the last scheduled result. See Verify a credential.
- A source with no schedule never re-checks at all. The first check runs and the credential can sit green indefinitely. This is the gap that actually catches people out, rather than the size of the window.
When the next check does run, the change is picked up, the worker's status updates, the change is written to the audit trail, and the notification goes out. The record will show both the date the answer changed in Oho and what it changed from — which is what you need to demonstrate you acted on what you knew, when you knew it.
What a change looks like
When a re-check comes back different from last time, three things happen at once:
- The worker's outcome updates. The credential's status changes on their profile, and their overall compliance follows.
- The change is recorded. The worker's profile keeps every check Oho has ever run, so you can see when the answer changed and what it changed from. That history is the audit trail — it's what lets you show what you knew and when.
- The right people hear about it. A status change raises a notification rather than waiting to be noticed.
You don't have to be watching for any of this. The compliance dashboards show the current picture, and notifications push the changes to you.
Expiry is watched separately
A card doesn't have to be cancelled to become a problem — most simply run out. Oho tracks expiry dates independently of what the register says. Two things then happen as the date approaches: what you see on the credential, and what Oho sends you. Both run off the same setting — your Expiring lead time — so the badge and the warning appear together.
What you see
The badge on a credential is read straight off the expiry date:
| Badge | When | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Expiring soon | Within your Expiring lead time — 30 days by default | Amber — get the renewal moving |
| Expired | The day after the expiry date | Red — the worker is no longer covered |
The badge uses the same Expiring lead time as the alert below, including any per-credential-type override — so a type you have given a longer run-up turns amber earlier on the credential as well. Read the badge as "a renewal needs booking", not "this is urgent today". The date on the credential is always the precise answer.
What Oho sends
The alert is the part you can tune, and tuning it moves the badge with it. Under Settings → Manage → Notifications → Expiry timing there are two lead times, Expiring and Expiring soon, defaulting to 30 and 7 days:
| Alert | When | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Expiring soon | At your Expiring lead time — 30 days by default | The renewal warning. It fires once. |
| Expired | The day after the expiry date | The worker is no longer covered |
There is one warning before expiry, not two. Oho raises it at the earlier of your two lead times, and Expiring soon must always be set fewer days out than Expiring — so the warning lands at your Expiring value, and the credential is already flagged by the time the shorter lead time is reached. With the defaults that means a single warning 30 days out, then nothing further until the credential expires. If you want the warning earlier, raise Expiring.
The Expiring lead time is therefore the only one worth tuning. Because Expiring soon is always the inner of the two, the warning has already gone out by the time a credential reaches it, so changing it sends nothing extra — all it does is set the floor Expiring has to stay above. Set the run-up you actually want on Expiring.
Lead times are set organisation-wide and can be overridden per credential type, so a police check or an interstate clearance can have a longer run-up than a first-aid certificate. Widen them if your renewals take longer than a month to come back. Customising them is a Plus feature; on other plans the defaults apply.
Expiry watching depends on Oho holding an expiry date. Some registers don't return one; where that's the case, Oho tracks the date you supplied when the credential was added, which is another reason to fill in Expiry Date on an import even though nothing forces you to.
Where monitoring behaves differently
Monitoring is only as good as the register behind it, and the registers aren't uniform. The differences that matter in practice:
| Behaviour | Where | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| The register pushes changes | NSW | Status changes can reach you between scheduled checks, not just at the next one |
| Renewals don't flow through | QLD | A renewed Blue Card must be re-checked; the new details won't appear on their own |
| No register to ask | ACT | Reviewed by a person on your schedule rather than looked up — see the state page |
| Access depends on your login | SA | If portal access lapses, checks fail rather than returning a status |
Each credential page carries its own Renewals & monitoring section with the detail for that register.
Related
- One-off verification — the first check, in more detail
- Ongoing checks — setting a source up
- Verification Sources — the registers Oho can reach, and how each behaves
- Notifications — where the alerts go