Help for the Reception Desk

Getting around the desk

Your screen has a side rail on a desktop monitor and bottom tabs on a tablet — the same destinations either way.

Check In is where you spend the shift. On Site shows who is currently in the building. Today is today's log. Residency answers "is 302 away right now?". Lists holds any list management has shared with your desk. Account is your profile, and Help is here.

Pick the building you are covering from the selector in the header if you cover more than one.

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.

Check people out when they leave. The On Site board 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.

Lists holds the lists management has shared with your desk. You can read them; you never edit them, and lists that have not been shared with reception do not appear.

The visitor count

On the On Site screen 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 tap to bring it back.

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.