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Getting your procedures into Tallen

Five things people ask. If yours is not here, write to us — a person answers, not a ticket system.

1. Getting your procedures in

Rather than typing each procedure in one at a time, you can prepare a spreadsheet — opening routine, closing routine, food safety, each with a few practice questions — and upload the lot at once.

In the app, open Admin and find Import from a file:

1. Download the template. It is an Excel workbook, and the first tab explains what to do. It is easiest to fill in on a computer, so you can also download it from this page.
2. Fill in your processes, one step per row. Practice questions are optional and go on their own tab.
3. Upload your file. Excel (.xlsx) and .csv both work. If you filled it in on a computer, get it onto your phone first — email it to yourself, or save it to Google Drive or OneDrive — then choose Upload your file and pick it from there.
4. Check the summary — it tells you how many processes and questions it found, and flags anything odd — then confirm.

Your team sees the new content right away, on the Learn tab to read and on Play to practice.

Fixing a mistake and uploading again

Uploading a corrected file does not leave you with two of everything. Tallen matches on the process name and asks which you meant:

• Update the ones that match — keeps each process's history and your team's sign-offs against it. This is what you want after fixing a typo.
• Add all as new copies — for when the file really is new material.

Names are matched loosely enough to survive retyping: capitals, extra spaces and trailing blanks are all ignored, so “Opening the shop ” and “opening the shop” are the same procedure.

Updating replaces a matched process's steps and questions with the ones in your file, so nothing is doubled up. Uploading never removes a process that isn't in your file — a file can hold just the few procedures you changed. To get rid of one, delete it in Admin.

2. Filling in the template

The workbook has three tabs. The example rows show a coffee shop — delete them and put in your own.

The process name on a question has to match one on the Your processes tab, or Tallen will not know where the question belongs. Capitals and extra spaces do not matter.

Prefer a plain CSV?

A .csv file works too, laid out one row per question. It is also the only way to import put-the-steps-in-order questions or time limits from a file. Repeat the process name on every row that belongs to it.

The column names are read forgivingly, so you do not have to match them exactly. Process name, Procedure, Prompt, Correct answer, Seconds, Option 1 and Step 1 are all understood.

Only want the reading, not the questions?

Leave the Practice questions tab empty (or, in a CSV, the question columns). You will get the write-up your team reads, and can add questions later in Admin. A process with no questions cannot be practiced, though — so it will not earn anyone points, and it cannot be passed.

If the upload is refused

Tallen will say it could not read the file. That almost always means it was saved in another format — Numbers, Google Sheets' native format, or a PDF. Export to .xlsx or .csv and try again.

Run your spreadsheet's own spell-check before uploading. It is the cheapest proofread you will get, and typos in a procedure are read as carelessness by the person following it.

3. Getting your team on

Your team does not need email addresses, passwords, or accounts you have to create. This is deliberate: setting up twenty logins is the thing that stops a rollout on day one.

Instead your workspace has a join code. You will find it on the Workspace screen: tap the gear at the top right of the Learn tab, then Workspace & sync. Share it however you already talk to your team — a group chat, a note by the register, out loud.

They open Tallen, enter the code and their name, and they are in. That is the whole process, and it takes about a minute.

When someone leaves

Remove them from your dashboard and their access stops. Their training record stays, with their name on it — you may still need to show that they were trained while they worked for you.

If a code gets out — an ex-employee, a photo of a noticeboard — choose New code on the Workspace tab. The old one stops working immediately and everybody already on the team keeps their access.

4. What a sign-off proves

When somebody has read a procedure, they tap Sign off — I’ve read and understood this process. That records their name, the procedure, the moment, and which version of it they read.

Sign-offs cannot be edited or deleted. Not by them, not by you, not by us. That is what makes the record worth anything: a log you could quietly tidy up proves nothing to whoever is asking.

Because the version is recorded, changing a procedure does not silently invalidate history. Old sign-offs stay true — they were accurate about the version that was read — and if you turned on “ask my team to read these again”, the dashboard shows who owes you a fresh read.

Getting it out of the app

On the compliance dashboard there are two downloads:

• Export sign-offs (CSV) — who acknowledged what, when, against which due date, and which version they read.
• Export practice log (CSV) — every practice run and its score.

Both open in Excel or Google Sheets. Departed staff keep their names in these files, so a record taken after somebody leaves still says who did the training.

5. Writing a process people actually follow

The hardest part of this is not the software. It is that most procedures live in somebody's head, and writing them down is a job nobody has time for. A few things make it go faster.

Write it so anyone can follow it. The reader might be new to the job, brushing up on something they learned months ago, or a seasoned hand learning a new or changed process. If a step assumes you already know where something is kept, it is not a step yet.

One action per step. “Check the float and unlock the back door and turn the lights on” is three things, and somebody will do two of them.

Put the real numbers in. Times, temperatures, amounts, the float total. Procedures fail at the specifics, not the generalities, and those specifics are what a question can test.

Say why, once. A step with a reason attached survives contact with a busy shift. A step without one gets skipped the first time somebody is in a hurry.

Questions that catch a skimmer

The point of a question is not to be hard. It is to fail somebody who scrolled to the bottom without reading.

• Ask about the specifics — the number, the order, the exception.
• Make the wrong answers plausible. Three obviously silly options test nothing.
• Only ask what the write-up actually answers. A question about something you never wrote down is a trick, and people stop trusting the whole thing.
• Use an order question where the sequence genuinely matters — a closing routine, a safety check, anything where doing step three before step two is the mistake — and not where it does not.

Tallen checks your content as it imports and will point out one-word steps, the same question asked twice in a procedure, two answer options that read identically, and a step repeated inside an ordering question. It imports either way; the notes are advice, not errors.