Help for the Reception Desk

Guest suites at the desk

If your building has a guest suite that the association rents to owners' guests, your desk shows a Guest suites card and a Guest suites page in the menu.

The card on your desk lists three things for your building: Arriving today (confirmed stays due to check in — one past its date is marked *was due in*), Leaving today (guests due to check out — one past its date is marked *was due out*) and Requests waiting (owners' requests waiting for confirmation, oldest first). Each row names the unit whose guests are staying. Tap a row to open the stay; guest names appear only there.

A stay, opened. Depending on where it stands you can Confirm or Decline a request (a reason is required — the owner reads it), Check in, Check out (an earlier date frees the unused nights and recomputes the amount), record a No-show (only after the check-in date), Record payment and Cancel. A button that cannot be used today says why. Edit guest details corrects the guests' names, phone and notes.

The Guest suites page (in the menu) shows each suite's calendar — free, requested or booked, with the unit holding each night — its check-in and check-out times and house rules, and every stay. Enter a phoned-in stay takes the unit, the dates and the guests for an owner who called; it starts as a request waiting for confirmation, recorded against the unit, and the owner sees it in their own app.

Is the suite ready? When an arriving guest follows a previous stay, their row on the card says whether the suite was cleaned since: Suite not cleaned yet until housekeeping finishes the turnover round, then Suite cleaned since the last stay. If your association doesn't use CleanCheck — or no after-check-out cleaning is scheduled for the suite — it reads Turnover clean: arrange with housekeeping. If it says it couldn't check, ask housekeeping directly; it does not mean the suite is clean.

Money is recorded, never taken. HelmHOA does not charge cards; recording a payment is bookkeeping.

What only a manager does: the rates, the house rules, the booking limits and switching a suite's bookings on or off. If a suite says it has not been set up yet, a manager sets it up in ServiceCheck.

If two requests race for the same nights, the first one saved wins and the other is told *"Those nights were just taken — pick other dates."*

Getting around the desk

The menu runs along the top of a computer or tablet, and along the bottom of a phone — the same destinations either way: Desk, Today's log, Residency, Lists, and Guest suites where your building has one (under More on a phone).

Desk is where you spend the shift. It has three lanes side by side (one at a time on a phone, picked with the switch at the top): Coming in — who is at the gate, logging a refusal, and today's expected arrivals; Here now — who is in the building, with Check out, and the latest entries; Desk tools — the visitor count, "Is a resident home?", the lists shared with your desk and the guest suite. The bubbles beside the title show contractors on site and the estimated visitors in, kept as two separate numbers, and — if your desk has LeakCheck — a droplet: green All dry, red when a sensor is wet, grey Couldn't check when the sensors could not be read.

Today's log is today's entries, admissions and refusals together, with the day's counts on one line at the top and a coloured dot on each entry named by its decision. Residency answers "is 302 away right now?". Lists holds every list management has shared with your desk. LeakCheck, where your desk has it, opens from the Lists section on the desk. Who is in the building is always the Here now lane on the desk — there is no separate screen for it. A list the desk could not read says Couldn't check in grey with Try again — it never shows as empty. Your Account, Help and Sign out are in the round initials button at the top right (under More on a phone).

If you cover more than one building, the building button at the top lists your posts — pick the one you are covering.

Checking a contractor in

Search for the company. The desk shows a band telling you where their documents stand, and you check them in from there.

The bands say "current documents on file", never "verified". You are confirming paperwork exists and has not expired — not that anyone rang the insurer. Say it that way if you are asked.

You log contractors and others required to carry documentation. Family, friends and deliveries are not logged here.

Type the company into Who is at the gate?, pick it, and the desk shows the band before you type anything else. If the company is not on the list, use Not on the list? Log a refusal. Work orders scheduled for today appear under Expected today — Arrived opens the check-in with the work order filled in. So do contractors an owner told the desk to expect, marked *Owner's contractor — Unit …* with the owner's note: Arrived fills in the unit and *Owner request*, and Acknowledge lets the owner see you know they are coming. Owners' notices for later days are under Coming up. Acknowledging is not admitting — the band still decides on the day.

Check people out when they leave. The Here now lane and the live count are only as good as check-out discipline.

When someone is blocked

If a company's documents are missing or expired, the desk will not let you check them in — and you cannot override it. That is deliberate, and it protects you: the decision is not yours to be argued out of.

What to do:

1. Tell them politely that management has to clear them.
2. Direct them to the management office.
3. Log the refusal. It takes a moment and it is the record that you followed the process.

A manager can grant a time-boxed exception. If they do, it appears at your desk and you can check the visitor in normally.

Residency and Lists

Residency tells you whether a unit is in residence or away, and shows what that answer is based on. If the information is too old to trust, it says unknown rather than guessing.

You can record what you observe — someone is back, someone has left — and add an expected return date if they tell you one at the counter. That is the whole reason you can write here: "back April 3" is said at the desk, and routing it through a manager loses it.

There is no free-text note field, deliberately. Dates and in-or-out only.

Away today lists the units expected to be empty — tap one to open it in the lookup.

Lists holds the lists management has shared with your desk. Pick one and it opens beside the list (full screen on a phone, with a back arrow); the filter box narrows its rows. You can read them; you never edit them, and lists that have not been shared with reception do not appear.

The visitor count

In the Desk tools lane you can tally visitors in and out by category.

It is anonymous. No names, no unit numbers, no notes — the record has nowhere to put them. It is a head count, nothing more.

Counting is not screening. Adding someone to the tally says a person entered; it does not say anyone checked them.

The screen blank and shared desks

The screen blanks itself when the desk sits idle, and you press Resume to bring it back. Stepping away? Press Hide screen (the eye at the top) to blank it straight away.

This is not a screensaver. A shared desk stays signed in across shift changes, so an unattended counter is an open console facing the lobby. The blank is what stops a visitor reading the screen while you are away from it.

Do not disable it, and do not leave the desk signed in as someone else. If the person taking over is a different user, sign out.