The onboarding doc nobody has time to write
gets written while you work.
Right now the process lives in one person’s head, plus a deck last updated two reorganizations ago. Switch Spawnit on, do the task once at the speed you already do it, and the clicks you make become numbered steps with the screen attached. There is no writing afternoon to schedule, because the recording is the authoring step.
Windows 64-bit · installs without admin rights · viewers need no account
The person who knows the process is the person who can least afford to stop.
That is why onboarding never gets written down. Not because nobody cares — because writing it costs a day that nobody has, and the day has to come out of the one calendar you cannot raid.
The month-end close. The payroll run. Raising a credit note. Setting up a new client file. Getting a starter into the six systems they need before lunch on day one. Every one of them lives in somebody’s hands, and the only written record is a deck that stopped matching the screens some time last year.
So the new hire shadows someone for a week, asks the same four questions again in month two, and the person who trained them loses a morning either way. None of that is a documentation problem. It is a time problem — and the only fix is to make documenting the work cost nothing on top of doing it.
- Record while you do the task. No second pass, no pasting screenshots into a document.
- The clicks you make become numbered steps, each with the screen attached.
- Pause from the tray when the phone rings; resume when you are back.
- Re-record when the process changes, and the guide is current again.
- One link at the end. Whoever reads it needs no account.
One task: run the weekly payroll.
Six steps, recorded once by the person who does it every Friday anyway. The step your colleague reads sits on top; the raw line Spawnit logged sits underneath — including the one it deliberately threw away.
- 1
Sign in to the payroll system
key press → edit "Password"
key label [redacted] · field painted black in the screenshot
- 2
Open this week's pay run
click → menu item "Pay runs"
menu item · Payroll
- 3
Import the timesheets
click → button "Import timesheets"
button · Pay run detail
- 4
Check the hours flagged as overtime
click → tab item "Exceptions"
tab item · Pay run detail
- 5
Approve the run
click → button "Approve pay run"
button · Pay run detail
- 6
Email the payslips
click → check box "Email payslips"
check box · Distribution
Step 1 is the one Spawnit threw away. Windows told it that field was a password, so the key labels became [redacted] in the log and the field’s rectangle was painted solid black in the screenshot before that screenshot was used for anything.
Black rather than blurred is deliberate: whoever reviews the guide can see at a glance that something was removed. And it is best-effort, not a guarantee — the scan covers the window in front, it gives up rather than hold up the recording, and it is skipped entirely on a machine Spawnit detects as low on memory. Continuous video gets no redaction pass at all, which is one reason it ships switched off.
“I don’t have time to make training materials” is the problem, not an objection to it. Spawnit does not ask you to book an afternoon. It asks you to switch on a recorder before a task you were going to do anyway, then do that task normally. The numbering, the screenshots and the control names come out of that run rather than out of a second pass over it, so the part that used to cost a day — writing the steps down, screenshot by screenshot — is not shortened, it is gone. What is left afterwards is turning the recording into a guide and sending the link. The only new habit is pressing record.
The fortnight before somebody goes.
Leave, secondment, resignation — the handover always lands in the two weeks when that person is busiest. Recording is the only kind of documentation that fits inside them.
A handover note is written by the person leaving, at the end of the day, from memory, about work they can do without thinking. That is close to the worst possible set of conditions for accurate writing, and it is why the person who inherits the job is still emailing them in November.
A recording inverts all four. It is made during the work rather than after it. It captures what was clicked rather than what was remembered. It shows the screen, so the next person recognizes where they are. And it costs the outgoing person nothing beyond the task they had to run that week regardless.
If they are leaving for good, pair the recorded handover with your access-revocation and hardware-return checklist. The recording preserves how the work is done; the checklist controls the exit.
- 1
List the processes only they run
Usually three to six. The test is blunt: if they were unreachable next Tuesday, what stops? Write those down and ignore everything else.
- 2
Record each one during a normal week
Not a rehearsal and not a demo account. The real run, on the real data, at the speed they actually work — that is what makes the steps match the screens the next person will see.
- 3
Send the links to whoever picks it up
They follow numbered steps with the screenshots in front of them, instead of decoding a handover note typed at five o'clock on the last Friday.
What lands in the guide, and what never does.
Sorted by what the recorder does, not by which software you run — there is no per-app profile in the product and no support matrix behind this page.
The screen, the step and the order
A screenshot with each step, the click or key press behind it, scrolls, and the window title and program where Windows reports them. One display per session — you pick which. Continuous video too, if you switch it on; it ships off.
The name of the thing you clicked
“Approve pay run” instead of a point on a screen. Windows can supply that name when the application publishes one, which is the application's choice and not Spawnit's. Where it doesn't, the step still shows the screen and the coordinates — it just carries no label.
Your voice, your face, your usage
There is no audio or microphone capture anywhere in the app, and no webcam capture. There is no analytics or telemetry SDK in the recorder. Recordings are written to your own Windows profile on that PC, and nothing uploads unless you sign in and turn sync on.
One more, stated plainly because an HR screen deserves it: the on-screen labels and window titles of the things you click are stored as ordinary text in the event log on that PC.
What people ask before the first recording.
Answered from what the Windows app does today, limits included.
Will my team think this is monitoring software?
It is built so they cannot miss it. Whenever the app is running there is an icon in the system tray — a red dot and a Recording tooltip while capture is live, grey when it is not — with Pause and Resume in its menu. Installing it puts a consent page in front of the person that itemizes what is captured, where it is stored on their PC, and that the app starts itself at sign-in; declining stops the installation. It is a tool you point at a task you are doing, not at a person.
Do I need IT to install it?
The app installs for your user account only and never asks for administrator rights, and the task that starts it at sign-in runs at least privilege and below-normal priority. Windows 64-bit is available first; the macOS capture app is in development and not available yet. If your organization blocks installers by policy you will still need whoever owns that policy — but the app itself does not ask to be elevated. The same restraint shapes what it captures. The input hook does no work in its callback: it hands events off and drops them rather than stall system input, so capture is deliberately lossy under load rather than deliberately complete. In plain terms: on a machine that is already struggling, a click can be missed, and the recorder is built to miss it rather than to make the whole desktop lag.
What if I fumble it halfway through?
Pause from the tray icon and resume when you are ready; a phone call does not cost you the recording. If a run goes badly enough that you would rather start over, record it again the next time you run the task — that costs you nothing you were not already spending. By default, sessions are purged once their newest file is 14 days old, with two exceptions worth knowing: a session still being written is never purged, and if you have enabled sync, a session that has not uploaded yet is kept, because the local copy is the only copy.
The process changes every few months. Won't the guide go stale?
Yes — exactly as a written SOP does, except that fixing it costs one run of the task rather than an afternoon with a screenshot tool. A guide reflects the run it came from; that is what makes it trustworthy and also what dates it. So the habit is not maintenance, it is repetition: re-record whichever process changed, the next time somebody runs it, and share the new link.
We would be recording payroll and HR screens. What ends up where?
On that PC, and only there unless you say otherwise. Recordings are written to your own Windows profile, under %USERPROFILE%\Videos\Spawnit, and nothing uploads unless you sign in and enable sync. Password fields are blacked out in step screenshots, and key presses into them are logged only as [redacted] — the typed characters are dropped, the event is kept. Best-effort, which means the scan covers the foreground window, it is time-bounded, and it is skipped entirely on a machine auto-detected as low-memory (under 4 GB of RAM, or two or fewer cores). Private-browsing windows are discarded whole, and anything the recorder cannot attribute to an application is discarded rather than kept. Two things to say plainly: the on-screen labels and window titles of what you click are stored as ordinary text in the local event log, and excluding a specific program — a password manager, say — is possible today only from the command line, because the desktop app ships that list empty with no setting to fill it.
Documenting something else?
Answer the same ticket once, then send the link
Record the fix while you are already doing it, then reply with a link instead of a call-back. Viewers open it in a browser, with no account.
IT & helpdeskOps & site leadsStandardise the process on a recording, not a rewrite
A process drifts because the document describing it is always one rewrite behind reality. Record one person's real pass at the task — workarounds included — and the take you choose becomes the standard. When it changes, re-record and send the new link.
OperationsIT & operationsDocument the Windows software a browser recorder cannot see
Spawnit records at the Windows desktop, not inside a page — so ERP fat clients, terminal sessions, RDP windows and the tool nobody will rewrite are all recordable. Specific about where UI Automation stops: a custom-drawn terminal screen, like an RDP window, is captured as pixels and coordinates rather than named controls.
ERP & legacy WindowsUse casesThe five things teams record first
Training and vacation handoffs are two of them. The others are the SOP that keeps getting postponed, the helpdesk answer you have typed out four times, and the legacy Windows tool nobody will rewrite.
Browse use casesPlansWhat this costs a small team
Every plan records, screenshots each step and produces a share link. The free plan carries up to 10 guides; Pro is unlimited. Pro and Team prices are still being finalized.
See pricingStart with the process only one person can run
You already know which one it is — the thing that stops if they are unreachable on Tuesday. Request access and tell us which workflows you need to capture, so that is the first task you record.