You can stage the two positive outcomes for a worker who has no Credda account: worked the shift, and covered a shift for someone else. You cannot stage Late, Left early or Did not turn up. Those rows are refused, and the refusal says so in plain terms rather than looking like a typo.
Nothing you stage reaches the worker's record until they claim it. Not a lower-weight version, not a pending score, nothing. Forty pasted email addresses produce forty invitations and zero outcomes.
What a staged record actually is
It sits in a holding area of its own. It is not on your roster, not in your seat count, not in anybody's score, not in the count of workers that could corroborate your organization, and it is never sent to the scoring service. There is no route from a staged row to a number.
Every status you see against a staged row says the equivalent of "waiting on them". None of them says "recorded", because nothing has been.
The limits
Up to 100 people in one request. Your note to the worker is capped at 500 characters. A staged record expires after 90 days, and when it expires nothing has been recorded.
Rows that get refused, and why each one is different
Adverse not stageable. You tried to stage a late, an early finish or a no-show. The product is refusing, not failing.
Self dealing. You staged a shift at your own email address.
Unknown outcome. The word you sent is not one of the five.
Missing email. There is no address to send to.
Rows are answered one at a time, so read the result per row rather than as one success or one failure.
Check whether each row says the person was actually notified. A staged record that nobody was told about is the one thing this feature must never produce quietly. If a row went out unnotified, the worker cannot claim it and cannot decline it, and it will simply expire.
What the worker sees
They get an email naming your organization, the outcome, the date and your note. They can open the page and decline it without creating an account.
That is deliberate on both halves. Making somebody sign up to find out what an employer wrote about them would be backwards, and making them sign up to refuse it would use the record as leverage to get an account out of them.
Only claiming needs an account, because holding an outcome on a record requires having a record.
If they claim it
The ordinary employer confirmation runs at that moment, and the checks decide then, on the real parties. Verification is never inherited from the staged row, because the staged row never had any. So a claimed shift can land as verified, or as recorded and not counted if your organization has not been corroborated yet.
Claiming also puts the worker on your roster, and on a paid plan a roster place is a billable seat. Ten workers claiming ten staged shifts is ten more seats. That is worth knowing before you send a batch of forty rather than when the invoice arrives. A free organization is never billed for anybody.
If they decline
Nothing is recorded, and what you wrote about them is deleted. Deleted, not hidden. The row keeps only enough to stop the same shift being staged at the same person again, and it loses everything personal in the process, so their email address is not kept in order to enforce that.
A decline is not a mark against them and it is not a mark against you. It records nothing at all.
Write the note as though a stranger will read it, because one will
The person receiving this did not sign up for anything and has no relationship with Credda. Name the shift so they can recognize it: "Saturday 2 August, 12:00 to 20:00, covered the bar for Priya" tells them what you mean. "Shift record from head office" does not, and it reads like something to ignore or report as spam.
Two honest limits worth knowing before you plan around this. Staging a record does not make anybody sign up, and quite a few people will not. And there is no version of this that works without a real email address for a real person, so a casual worker you only know by first name cannot be staged at all.