The process drifted. The document didn’t notice.
Standardise on a recording instead.
Spawnit Capture records one person’s real pass at a task — the clicks they make, a screenshot at each step, the name of the control wherever the application publishes one — and turns it into numbered steps behind a single link. What it never does is judge the pass: there is no analytics layer, so which take becomes the standard is a decision you make by watching it, and keeping the standard current means recording it again.
Windows 64-bit · Free plan · viewers need no account
The procedure is written once and renegotiated daily.
Every shift adds an amendment nobody writes down. Six months later the document describes a process nobody runs — and each site is running a different unwritten version of it.
Processing a customer return. Releasing an order held on credit. Booking in a delivery that arrived short. Adjusting stock after a count. Logging a QA failure before the line restarts. Each one has a written procedure somewhere, and each one is actually run the way the longest-serving person on that shift runs it.
That is not carelessness. The person who knows the current shape of the process is on the floor running it, and stopping to rewrite a document is the one thing a busy site never does. So the rewrite waits, the workarounds accumulate, and on the day you need the standard — a new starter, a second site, an audit — what you have is a description of last year. A recording removes the rewrite from the loop: the performance is the documentation.
- Record one person's real pass at the task, at working speed, workarounds included.
- A screenshot at each step, with the click or key press behind it.
- The window title and the control's name, wherever the application publishes one.
- One link per take. The other shift — or the other site — opens it with no account.
One task: process a customer return.
Six steps in an order-management client, recorded while a real RMA was worked. The step the next shift reads sits on top; the raw line Spawnit logged sits underneath — including the step the order grid refused to name.
- 1
Open the Returns work queue
click → menu item "Returns"
menu item · Order management
- 2
Enter the RMA number from the paperwork
key press → edit "RMA number"
edit · Return header
- 3
Select the returned line in the order grid
click → (588, 402)
no accessible name — coordinates and screenshot only
- 4
Approve the credit
click → button "Approve credit"
button · Credit memo
- 5
Mark the item for restock
click → check box "Restock item"
check box · Disposition
- 6
Post the return
click → button "Post"
button · Return editor
Step 3 carries coordinates where every other step carries a label, because that order grid tells Windows nothing about its cells. Spawnit recorded the click and the screen and declined to invent a name — on a page about trusting the take verbatim, this row is what verbatim looks like.
Two people do this task two ways. The guide is the take you chose — verbatim. If the person you recorded checks the stock level before approving the credit, that habit is now in the standard; if they skip a check the binder swears by, you just found out. Neither discovery is the recorder’s judgment. Both are yours to make, watching the take.
Everything in one take, and what holds across takes.
Organised by what happens in one recording and what stays constant between them. None of it varies by vendor — there is no per-app profile in the product and no support matrix behind this page.
The pass as it was performed
A screenshot at each step, with the click, scroll or key press behind it, 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. Nothing is tidied afterwards: if the operator took the shortcut, the shortcut is in the take.
The same grammar, whoever records
Steps are logged the same way regardless of who performed the pass: the control's name — “Approve credit”, not a point on a screen — wherever the application publishes a UI Automation provider, and coordinates with the screenshot where it does not. That is what makes two people's takes readable side by side. The reading is yours: nothing in the product compares one pass to another.
How much of your order screen gets a name is the application’s decision, and Spawnit publishes no coverage figure for anyone’s software, because no measurement exists to publish. The uia-audit command reports what share of a window it can describe — run it on the workstation the process actually runs on, not on the newest laptop in the office.
The standard is a recorded take, not a promise. Spawnit records one person’s real pass at the task and turns it into steps. Deciding that take is the standard is a human review; when the standard changes, you record it again and send the new link. There is no cleanup pass, no analytics layer, and no claim that the old link updates itself.
The questions an ops lead asks before trusting a take.
Starting with the one about enshrining somebody's bad habits. Every answer states its limits.
Doesn't a recording just canonise one person's habits — workarounds and all?
Yes — verbatim, and that is both the point and the limit. The workaround nobody wrote down is exactly the knowledge the document kept losing, so capturing it is the job. Whether that take deserves to be the standard is a different question, and Spawnit does not answer it: there is no process mining, no recommendation engine and no scoring of one pass against another anywhere in the product. The review is a person — you watch the take, decide, and re-record if the habit it caught is one you want gone. What the recorder guarantees is narrower and more useful: the take you chose is what the next shift reads, unedited.
Our shop-floor PCs are old. What gives way first?
The password scan, and it gives way completely rather than degrading quietly. On a machine Spawnit auto-detects as low-memory — under 4 GB of RAM, or two or fewer cores — that scan is skipped outright, so step screenshots recorded there get no password blackout at all. If a sign-in happens anywhere in the process, record the take on a machine above that bar, or start recording after the sign-in. The detection is automatic, not a setting somebody forgot.
Three shifts share one workstation. Whose recording is it?
Whoever is signed in. Recordings are written to the signed-in user's Windows profile, under %USERPROFILE%\Videos\Spawnit — on a shared login that is one folder every shift can open, which is worth deciding about before the first take rather than after. 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.
Do I need IT to roll it out across sites?
Not for the install itself. The app installs per user and never asks for elevation, and the installer puts a consent page in front of whoever installs it, itemizing what is captured and where it is stored — declining aborts the installation. Windows 64-bit is available first; the macOS capture app is in development and not available yet. If a site blocks installers by policy you will still need whoever owns that policy, but there is no deployment project hiding here: every machine that records is one per-user install with no admin rights involved.
What leaves the site?
Nothing has to. Recordings are written to that operator's own Windows profile, under %USERPROFILE%\Videos\Spawnit, and nothing uploads unless they sign in and enable sync. Sending a take to another site is a decision made after the fact — sign in, enable sync, share the link — not a background behaviour of the recorder. No audio, microphone or webcam capture exists anywhere in the app, and there is no telemetry SDK in the client.
Month-end is exactly when we would record. Does capture keep up on a busy machine?
It is built to lose rather than to lag. 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. Dropped events are counted and logged as an aggregate, not recovered — so a take recorded under real load can carry a hole, and the honest response is the cheap one: the task will be run again, record it again. What the design refuses to do is slow down the machine the work is on.
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 & helpdeskPeople & team leadsOnboard from real work, not last year's slide deck
Every step shows the real screen, and names the control wherever the application publishes one, so a new hire follows the job as it is done today. Re-record when it changes and the guide is current again.
HR, onboarding & trainingIT & 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 rest of what teams record first
The SOP is one of five jobs. The others: onboarding the next hire, the helpdesk answer typed out four times, the vacation handoff, and the legacy Windows tool nobody will rewrite.
Browse use casesPlansWhat this costs a site
Capture, per-step screenshots and share links are on every plan — up to 10 guides on the free plan, unlimited on Pro. Pro and Team pricing is being finalized.
See pricingStart with the process that drifted furthest
You already know which one it is — the one where the written steps and the performed steps parted ways a while ago. Request access and tell us which workflows you need to capture, so the first standard you set is a recorded take instead of another rewrite.