Pick an event date more than 7 days old and the form reveals a field that was not there before: Reason for the late entry. Without it, the save is refused.
This is not distrust. It is one of the nine data-integrity attributes an assessor may work through, the contemporaneous one: a record is written when the work happens.
Every record holds two times: the date of the event (when the calibration was done, when the sample arrived) and the moment of entry (when the row was written). The system always held both.
What was missing was the comparison. A result typed three weeks afterwards looked exactly like one entered at the bench at the moment of measurement. An assessor had no way to tell the two apart, and the laboratory had no way to show that it tells them apart.
This is the important part. Entering something after the fact is legitimate and routine: a bench sheet is transcribed into the system, a training course is recorded after the return, a reagent container was opened last week and nobody got to it.
The rule asks only that it says why. That is precisely what turns a late record from a question mark into acceptable evidence.
In eight places, the ones that hold a real event date:
| Page | The date that counts |
|---|---|
| Samples | Received date |
| Calibrations | Calibration date |
| Reagent Lots | Opened date |
| Proficiency Testing | Testing date |
| Training Records | Training date |
| Customer Complaints | Received date |
| Internal Audits | Audit date |
| Management Reviews | Review date |
Pages holding a forward date — a document's next review, for instance — are excluded: a planned date cannot be "late".
Into the audit trail, not into a field on the record. No entity gained a column for it. The justification is written where an assessor already looks, beside who made the entry and when.
It is a house rule, not a clause requirement — the standard names no figure. It was chosen so ordinary work is never interrupted, and only the cases that genuinely need explaining are caught.