Cairnova Casework
Case management for regulators and ombudsman offices, with every deadline counted in working days.
Cairnova Casework runs a case from receipt to disposal — assessment, investigation, decision, closure and records retention — against case types, stages, deadlines and checklists that your organisation defines, rather than ones written into code.
Who it is for
Bodies that receive, investigate and decide, and have to show their working afterwards.
Regulators, commissioners, ombudsman offices and complaints-handling bodies share a shape of work that general-purpose ticketing systems handle badly: a case arrives, has to be validated against statutory conditions, is investigated against a clock that counts only working days, is decided by someone senior to the person who investigated it, and then has to be kept — or destroyed — according to a retention schedule that an auditor will one day check.
The first configuration we built is shaped around information-rights casework: appeals under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004, enquiries, interventions, enforcement, service complaints and the office’s own information requests. Nothing in the core knows what freedom of information is. Those case types are configuration an organisation publishes; a different regulator publishes different ones.
- Information-rights and data-protection regulators
- Ombudsman offices and public-service complaints handlers
- Professional and sector regulators running fitness-to-practise or compliance casework
- Council, health board and public body teams handling statutory complaints, reviews and requests
One case, one record, from receipt to disposal
Below is the appeal case type from the starting set, as the engine runs it. Each stage carries a working-day target, the checklist a case must complete before it can leave, and the roles allowed to move it. Every one of those is yours to change in the designer and simulate before you publish.
-
Received
Open
3 working days
Acknowledgement sent to the applicant -
Validation
Open
10 working days
Request, review and identity confirmed -
Investigation
Active
40 working days
Authority notified, submissions requested and reviewed -
Awaiting submissions
Hold
Clock stopped
Due date moves by exactly the working days held -
Decision
Active
15 working days
Drafted, reviewed by a senior officer, approved, issued
What it covers
- Case types you define
-
Stages, transitions, working-day targets, checklists, outcomes and custom fields are set by an administrator in a designer, tested in a simulator against a sample case, and then published as a frozen version. The vocabulary is fixed and the platform never evaluates text a tenant typed, so configuration cannot become code. Six case types ship as a starting set to copy from.
- Intake and triage
-
Cases arrive by web form, email, letter or telephone. Inbound mail from a connected Microsoft 365 mailbox lands in a triage queue as unallocated correspondence; nothing is attached to a case on the strength of a subject line. A validation officer confirms the applicant, the authority and the statutory conditions before anything is accepted.
- The case workspace
-
Overview, parties, tasks, notes, documents, correspondence, decisions and a timeline, in one place. What the case offers next — which actions, which outstanding requirements, who may take them — is decided by the engine and shown as data, never re-implemented in the browser. A view of the case list is a link that can be kept, shared and saved.
- Decisions and correspondence
-
A decision notice is drafted, reviewed by a senior officer, approved, and issued as a PDF by a signatory — and the engine refuses the transition if any of those steps is missing. Letters are generated from templates your organisation maintains, and every piece of correspondence is held against the case.
- Deadlines and workload
-
A daily scan warns owners of cases due within three working days and tells owners and team leaders about cases past target. Queues show what is unallocated, what is due and what is late, by team and by officer.
- Records management
-
Closure starts a retention clock from the schedule that matches the case type. When a review falls due, a records manager decides — destroy, anonymise, or retain with a reason — and the decision is written to an append-only disposal log that outlives the record it describes. A legal hold stops all of that until it is lifted.
- Reporting
-
Caseload, performance against target, median and mean working days to close, outcomes by kind and by case type, cases by public authority, and the figures an annual report needs — with every chart’s numbers also present as text. A register of Scottish public authorities is installed for each organisation.
- Roles
-
Case officer, senior case officer, validation officer, enquiries officer, team leader, head of service, head of enforcement, records manager and administrator, each with a seat the organisation grants. Nobody gets access by signing in alone. A Cairnova operator can provision an organisation and see how large it is, and cannot read a single case.
Built for people who use it all day
Casework is read on a screen for seven hours at a stretch, by people with different eyesight, different devices and different needs. The interface is built to meet them rather than to be demonstrated once.
- Appearance
- Light, dark and high-contrast themes, two densities and three text sizes, chosen by each person. Your organisation’s brand colour drives the palette.
- Keyboard first
- A command menu on ⌘K / Ctrl+K reaches any case or screen. Labels wired to controls, native dialogs, visible focus, a skip link and live regions for notices.
- Any device
- Works at phone width with a bottom bar, and prints cleanly. Every figure in every chart is also present as text for screen readers and for copying into a report.
How it is built
| Separation between organisations | Two independent controls, neither trusted alone: a tenant discriminator on every entity in the application, and row-level security policies in PostgreSQL that refuse reads and writes across the boundary whichever code asked. The application connects as a role that does not own the tables, and refuses to start outside development if that is not so. A migration that adds a table without an isolation policy fails rather than leaking quietly. |
|---|---|
| Encryption | Personal data is encrypted in the application with AES-256-GCM before it reaches the database, under keys the database never sees; a full dump yields references, dates, stage codes and ciphertext. Keyed blind indexes let an applicant’s email or a name be found again without the plaintext being stored. Documents are encrypted as streams before they reach object storage. Keys rotate by configuration, without re-encrypting history. |
| Audit | Every change is recorded in the same transaction as the change itself, so record and audit cannot disagree. The audit table is append-only by database trigger for every role including the owner, and each entry carries the hash of the one before it, so a gap or a rewrite is detectable through an integrity check. Reads of restricted material are audited too. |
| Hosting | United Kingdom — AWS London (eu-west-2), including document storage and backups. No data transfer outside the UK. |
| Sign-in | Secura SSO, with multi-factor authentication when your organisation requires it, and federation to the identity provider you already run. |
| Microsoft 365 | Optional, per organisation, against your own tenant through Microsoft Graph: a shared mailbox read into triage, outbound mail sent from it, calendar and document library access. Credentials are held encrypted and the integration can be switched off without touching anything else. |
| Architecture | One deployable with strong module seams — audit, tenancy, calendar, parties, case types, cases, documents, correspondence, notifications, retention, reporting, integration — each exposing one public package, with an architecture test that fails the build if a module reaches into another’s internals. No business rules in controllers; none in the browser. |
| Open interface | A documented REST API with an OpenAPI description, so your own reporting, data warehouse or a successor system can read what is yours. Exit is a structured export, not a negotiation. |
Where we are
Cairnova Casework is in development. A working prototype — the service and the interface — is built and staged, and we can demonstrate it to you live. The demonstration environment carries an example organisation with its teams and seventeen example users across every role, six configured case types, letter templates, the Scottish bank holiday calendar, retention schedules, a register of public authorities and a caseload at every stage.
It has not been deployed for any customer, and we hold no contract for it. We built it to production standard against what Scottish regulators and public bodies publish about how they work, not against a signed specification, and we are saying so plainly because a buyer needs to plan around the real position.
What remains before a first deployment: hardening against a real caseload, an independent accessibility audit against WCAG 2.2 AA, penetration testing, and a supervised migration from whatever a first customer runs today.
We are looking for one regulator, commissioner or ombudsman office to shape it against real cases before general release. An early partner gets the product at cost, direct influence over what gets built next, and an exit that costs nothing but time.
Ask for a demonstration. We will walk you through the prototype with the person who built it, from intake to disposal, and answer the questions your procurement and information governance leads will have. Email info@cairnova.io or call +44 (0)7301 516129.