Build the picture from both directions

Could we not do this with calendars and to-do lists?

In theory, yes. Shared calendars, shared task lists and a wiki page describing who is responsible for what each cover a piece of it. In practice the combination takes a discipline no organisation sustains for long. Somebody has to enter next year’s recurring work, somebody has to keep the wiki current, and somebody has to follow up that all the shared things actually got done. That somebody is nearly always one person.

What is missing is the overview and the automation. Nothing shows everything the organisation has committed to in one place, nothing moves responsibility on when somebody falls ill or leaves, and nothing tells you who should have done the thing nobody did. Kalends keeps those three in the register rather than in somebody’s head.

Why not just put everything in the calendar?

Because the calendar is for meetings with people. David Allen calls it the hard landscape in Getting Things Done: what has to happen on a given day or at a given time. Watch dates, renewals and periodic checks are soft dates. They should surface as they approach, not block a day. Entered as all-day events they flood the calendar, and everyone stops reading it.

So most people leave them out, and forget. Kalends is the place for the soft dates: when they come up, who owns them and whether they were done. The day a commitment needs a fixed time, that one occurrence can be added to the calendar, and the calendar stays clean.

Is Kalends a fit for our organisation?

Kalends suits an organisation carrying more recurring commitments than it has administrative capacity to keep track of. In practice that tends to start somewhere between twenty and two hundred and fifty employees, though just as often it is a single department inside a larger organisation that needs to account for its own area. Property and facilities management, manufacturing, health and social care, food, education, and IT and consulting firms tend to recognise themselves, because commitments there are dated, recurring and have to be evidenced afterwards.

What Kalends is not is a task tool for running projects, or a place to keep documents. If what you mainly need is documents, versions and deviations, you are looking for a management system rather than for Kalends.

What happens while somebody is away?

Appoint a temporary stand-in for a fixed period or until further notice. The stand-in receives reminders and escalations while the long-term ownership stays put. Cover ends automatically after the inclusive end date, or when the person or an administrator confirms the return.

Before you decide, you see what the absence actually costs, split by horizon: what falls due this week, what falls within the month and what is waiting further out. That is where you find that the person signed off sick is also the one who should have started planning the annual conference. Otherwise that surfaces only once it is too late to do anything about it.

What happens when the person responsible leaves?

The commitment and its history stay with the organisation. Hand each responsibility area and recurring commitment to the right successor from its next occurrence, without earlier confirmations, comments or evidence disappearing.

The same picture is here: before the handover you see everything the person carries, from what falls due before their last day to the annual work that otherwise appears long after anybody has stopped wondering who used to do it. Different areas can go to different successors.

Where is our data stored?

In Finland, within the EU/EEA. Each organisation's data is separated from every other organisation's at the database level.

Can we export our data?

Yes. An account administrator can download the shared content and history as one Excel workbook from the account settings. Entries another person has marked private remain private and are not included.

Which languages are supported?

Kalends is available in Swedish and English today. More languages will be added based on demand — do get in touch if yours is missing.

Do private commitments count towards the price?

Private commitments are included from Team and do not count towards the organisation's number of commitments. Colleagues can use private tags without it becoming a cost question for the organisation.

Does Kalends include AI chat?

Yes. The built-in AI chat can help you explore the register and work with commitments in Kalends. Your organisation supplies its own API key (BYOK) and chooses OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini. Only the active provider receives your questions and the relevant Kalends context; provider usage is billed directly to your own account.

Does Kalends encourage micromanagement?

That depends on how it is used. Kalends is meant to track the organisation’s standing commitments, not measure how individuals spend their working day. It states what the organisation must uphold, when it is due and who is responsible; the responsible person retains the freedom to decide how the work is done.

Follow-up should be proportionate. For most commitments, a simple confirmation is enough. Evidence is needed only when the risk, a contract or regulation calls for it. Trust in the person and traceability for the organisation are not opposites: the confirmation protects continuity when somebody is away, changes role or leaves.

Can Kalends be used for our management system?

Kalends does not replace a management system. It holds the part of one that has a date. Process documents, non-conformities and risk assessments stay where they are today. What Kalends takes care of is the recurring work that has to be carried out and later shown to have been done: management reviews, internal audits, self-inspections, access reviews, calibration, supplier assessments and the annual follow-up. Each one gets an owner, a rhythm and a traceable receipt that it happened.