A visitor is somebody on site who is not on the project: the client walking round, building control attending, the architect, a delivery driver, an HSE inspector. They are signed in and out by whoever is hosting them, or sign themselves in from the site poster, and the record is kept in the project’s Visitors section, on both the mobile app and the web app. Visitors have no account, no login and no seat, and never will.
Why it matters: If there is an incident and the site is evacuated, the question at the muster point is who is on site, and the answer has to include the building control officer who signed in twenty minutes ago as well as the crew. A line of text in a diary is not a fire register. Beyond that, building control and HSE attendance are routinely the facts a dispute turns on, and “which days did building control attend” has to be something the app can answer rather than something you read a year of diary days to find.
Where to find it:
- In a browser, the Visitors section in the project’s menu. The roll call is at the top, the register underneath it
- On the phone, Roll call in the menu, and the Visitors card on the day in the Site Diary
- In the Site Diary, on both, each visit appears in the day’s feed at the time the visitor arrived, and on the printed day
Signing somebody in:
- Press Sign a visitor in
- Put in their name, and their company or the body they are from
- Choose why they came: Client, Building control, HSE, Inspector, Designer or consultant, Delivery, Subcontractor or Other. It is a list rather than a box so attendance can be counted and searched for later
- Set the time they arrived, and who they came to see if there was somebody in particular
- A contact number and a note are optional. The note is for the detail the list cannot carry: “NHBC stage 4”, “delivering the lintels”
- Tick Site induction completed if they have been inducted for this site
- Press Sign in
Leave Time out blank while they are still on site. When they leave, press Sign out on their row, or open the visit and set the time. If they left after midnight, set the day they left as well.
Visitors signing themselves in from the site poster: A site administrator can print a site poster that lets visitors sign themselves in. The visitor scans it with their own phone’s camera, with no app and no account, and signs in on the page it opens:
- They read what the site wants a visitor to know: the note the administrator wrote (where to report, the assembly point, the first aider) and the PPE to wear
- They give their name and why they came, and optionally their company, a phone number and who they are here to see
- They tick that they have read it, and press Sign in
- When they leave they scan the poster again with the same phone and press Sign out
To print one, open Project Settings, then Site poster, press Print a poster and tick Let visitors sign in. Write the note, tick the PPE and choose who is told when a visitor signs in (whoever printed it, somebody else on the project, or nobody); that person gets a notification on their phone. What a poster tells visitors is fixed when it is printed, like the paper itself: to change it, print a new poster and withdraw the old one.
A poster can only sign visitors in on a project in a company, and only once the company has given a privacy contact (an owner or administrator adds it in the company’s settings, or while printing), because the page tells visitors who keeps their details and who to ask about them.
Signed in from the poster, and did not sign out: Every visit a visitor made themselves says Signed in from the poster, on the register, the roll call, the Site Diary and the printed copies, because nobody on the site vouched for it at the time; the poster did, and the poster records who printed it. A visitor who walks off without signing out is signed out automatically once the site’s day ends and shows Did not sign out, so they are not on the next morning’s roll call. Visitors your team signed in are never closed that way. If a time is known, correct the visit and it becomes that time.
If a poster gets out: Withdraw it in Project Settings, and it signs nobody new in (anybody it already signed in can still sign out). Administrators can also press Remove poster sign-ins on the register to remove the self sign-ins on a range of days. Each poster can sign in a limited number of visitors a day, and removing entries does not give it more.
It works with no signal. On the phone the whole thing is written to the device and sent when there is signal again, because a gate or a cabin is exactly where the bars run out. Anybody on the job can sign a visitor in, sign one out, or correct a visit; the person who signed somebody in may have gone home by the time they leave.
The roll call: The top of the Visitors section answers one question: who is on site right now. It counts the crew and the visitors together and lists them longest on site first, which is the order a muster list is called in.
- A member counts as on site when their last check-in today was an arrival with no departure after it
- A visitor counts as on site until somebody signs them out, with no end of day, because a visitor nobody signed out is precisely who a roll call must not lose
- Anybody on site without an induction recorded is flagged, and the count of them is called out above the list
- Press Print roll call in a browser for a sheet you can carry to the muster point. It names the project and the exact time the list was taken, and drops everything else
Inductions: A visit records whether that visitor has been inducted for this site, and when. The date can be set back: somebody who was inducted on an earlier visit was inducted then, not at this morning’s gate. Who recorded it is stamped automatically and cannot be typed in by hand. An induction more than a year old is marked as such. Nothing refuses a visitor entry over an induction: whether somebody may come on site is the site’s decision, and the app’s job is to make sure nobody has to guess.
Finding a visit again: The register under the roll call covers the last week, month, 90 days or year. You can narrow it to one purpose, search a name or a company, or show only the people still on site. That is how to answer “has the HSE been on site this year”, “which days did building control attend”, or “who was that delivery driver in March”.
Corrections are visible: Correcting a visit after the fact marks it as corrected, and the project’s administrators can see what was changed, by whom and when. Signing somebody out is completing the record rather than correcting it, so it is not marked. This exists because a corrected time presented as an original one destroys the credibility of the whole document the moment the other side finds one.
Who can see the register: Administrators and members. Followers cannot: a follower is typically a client or an outgoing subcontractor, and a list of who visited, with their phone numbers, is not theirs to read. The record of corrections is narrower still, and is for administrators only.
How long visitors’ details are kept: 90 days by default. An organisation can have its own period, from 90 days to seven years. When it ends the visitor’s name, company, phone number and note are removed automatically and the visit itself is kept, so the site’s record still shows that building control attended on the 3rd, with nobody’s personal details attached. Because this is a health and safety record a site is expected to keep, an individual entry cannot be deleted on request inside that period; an administrator can still remove one that was entered by mistake.
What it does not do: There is no kiosk mode: a visitor signs themselves in on their own phone from a poster an administrator printed, never on a shared site device. A visitor gets no account and no seat, and sees nothing of the project. The page never lists anybody else, and there is no “find your name to sign out”: only the phone that signed a visitor in can sign them out, so nobody can take somebody else off the roll call.