How do I keep track of who owes what to whom on a team?

What a commitment tracker has to hold

A promise made in a corridor sounds simple. You pass a colleague, mention a report you owe them, they nod, and you both walk on. The trouble starts two days later, when one of you remembers the date differently, or not at all.

For a promise to survive, it needs four things. First, who owes it. Second, to whom. Third, what exactly is owed, not “the thing we discussed”, but the report, the call, the revised quote. Fourth, by when. A date, not a vague “soon”.

In a chat thread, those four things scatter. The name is in one message, the detail in another, the date buried under a string of replies. Scrolling back to find them takes longer than the promise itself. And when the thread moves on, the promise moves out of sight.

A commitment tracker, in the plain sense, is simply a place where those four things sit together. Not a clever system, just a record that answers one question: who owes what to whom, and by when. If you cannot answer that in a few seconds, the tracker is not doing its job.

Where a commitment tracker template drifts

A shared spreadsheet looks like a good start. Columns for owner, recipient, task, date. You set it up on a Monday, share the link, and feel organised. By Friday, half the rows are empty and the other half are guesses.

The reason is not laziness. Updating a sheet is a second job. You finish a conversation, then open the file, find the right row, type the detail, save. That is a separate act, done after the fact, and it competes with the next conversation already waiting.

So people update in batches. They fill in what they remember, skip what they do not, and leave the date blank because they are not sure. The sheet becomes a record of what someone thought at the end of the week, not what was agreed in the moment.

A chat thread drifts differently. It is always current, but only for the people in it. Someone joins late, someone leaves, and the promise lives on in a message nobody re-reads. The thread answers “what did we say?” only if you scroll far enough and trust your memory of the tone.

Neither tool fails because it is badly made. They fail because keeping them accurate is extra work, and extra work gets postponed.

Promises run both ways

Most of the promises in a small business do not point one way. You owe a customer a delivery date. A supplier owes you a quote. A colleague owes you feedback on a draft, and you owe them the draft in the first place.

A promise needs a name and a date, whether you owe it or are owed it. That is the whole shape of it. The name says who is responsible. The date says when it lands. Without either, you have a hope, not a promise.

Promises change hands. A customer asks for a call-back. You ask a colleague for a figure. The colleague asks you for the file first. Each one is a promise with a name and a date, and each one deserves the same treatment.

Adding one without a form

The usual way to record a promise is to open a form, fill in fields, choose a category, pick a date from a calendar. That works until the conversation moves faster than the form. With Felesh, after a conversation you type one sentence about what happened, and from that sentence Felesh drafts three things: the note, the promise with its date if you gave one, and the next step. Each draft shows its reason and waits for your yes.

A task is different: it is added directly, with no approval step. This matters for the corridor moment. You do not need to decide the structure while the other person is still talking. You just need one sentence afterwards.

Asking who owes what

Once promises are recorded, the question becomes how to find them. You could open a list and scan it, but you usually want something specific: what did I promise the customer on Tuesday? What is the supplier holding for me? You can ask Felesh questions in your own words about your work, and the answer comes from your own records.

So the question “who owes what to whom?” becomes a direct ask. You phrase it your way, and the records answer it.

On a team, a task can be assigned to a person or a team, which you set up in Settings under operators and teams. The person it is assigned to gets a notice in the panel when it comes due, and overdue tasks stand out on the list. There is no email or text.

When a commitment app is not the answer

A record of promises only helps if the work is said where it is recorded. If the real conversation happens in a hallway and the record happens later, from memory, the record will drift. If the conversation happens in a tool that never feeds the record, the record will be incomplete.

No tracker fixes that. It can only hold what is put into it. If the habit is to speak first and record second, the tracker will lag. If the habit is to record at the moment, the tracker stays honest.

The limit is not technical. It is whether the people involved treat the record as part of the work, not an extra step after it.

Start with this week’s promises

Take the promises you already know about, the ones you owe and the ones owed to you. Give each one a name and a date. That is the whole start.

Begin with this week, not the whole quarter.

See how promises are recorded.