Sertus vs GrievTrac: Beyond Basic Grievance Tracking
GrievTrac was an early entrant in online grievance tracking. Sertus is what comes after tracking — AI that reads the collective agreement, assesses each case, and surfaces the precedents that apply. Built by the co-author of Canadian Labour Arbitration(Brown & Beatty).
Why Canadian teams outgrow GrievTrac
GrievTrac built a useful product: an online place to log grievances, mark their steps, track their deadlines, and produce reports. For a union that previously kept binders and spreadsheets, that alone is a real step forward. Many locals across North America still run on it.
The limits show up when the work gets serious. A grievance tracker cannot read the collective agreement, cannot extract facts from evidence, cannot tell you which past awards apply, and cannot draft the step letter. The system records what you type — nothing more. Every hour of analysis still happens in the steward's head, the lawyer's notepad, or a Word document opened on the side.
Sertus does the tracking baseline GrievTrac does — every grievance, every step, every deadline — and then does the work that comes after. The AI reads each collective agreement, flags the articles that apply to a grievance, extracts established facts from uploaded evidence, assesses the case from both sides, drafts correspondence, and finds similar past awards. The system helps decide, not just record.
Feature comparison at a glance
Canadian labour law
Sertus: Provincial legislation, Canadian arbitration practice, bilingual support, Canadian data residency.
GrievTrac: US-oriented. Designed around the US union-side grievance procedure.
AI case assessment
Sertus: Reads the collective agreement and grievance record, surfaces strengths and risks from both sides in minutes.
GrievTrac: Tracking, forms, and reports. No native AI case analysis.
Collective agreement parsing
Sertus: Parses 40-page PDFs in under 60 seconds and indexes each article for natural-language search.
GrievTrac: Agreements stored as attachments. Search lives outside the case workflow.
Evidence intelligence
Sertus: AI extracts established facts from uploaded evidence and links them to the case record.
GrievTrac: Evidence stored as attachments — every fact still re-keyed by hand.
Who it serves
Sertus: Both unions and employers on the same platform — role-appropriate views of the same case.
GrievTrac: Primarily union-side. Less common in employer or joint-committee deployments.
Migration path
Sertus: Imports historical grievances from PDF in bulk — typical caseload migrates in days, not weeks.
GrievTrac: Self-serve export to PDF or spreadsheet; migration to a new system is manual.
What you keep when you move
Migrating off a basic tracker rarely produces a clean structured export. Most teams leave years of history behind because the data comes out as PDFs or static spreadsheets. Sertus parses those exports, reconstructs each case with parties, dates, articles, and evidence attached, and surfaces patterns across the historical caseload. A 300-case backlog typically migrates in a single onboarding session.
Once the backlog is in place, Sertus takes over the day-to-day work. New grievances are filed electronically or imported from paper. The AI drafts the first response, flags the relevant articles, and surfaces deadline risk across the active caseload. Related reading: what grievance tracking software should do in 2026, grievance management, and AI case assessment.
Last updated: May 2026
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