Contractor sign-in logs and attendance records for Lane Cove buildings

Emergency management is the first and most important. If a building has to be evacuated at nine at night, someone needs to know how many people are inside and who they are. A log that records only a company name does not answer that. Neither does one that records arrival but not departure, which is the most common design flaw in building logs.

Security is the second: a record of who had access and when, which supports any later question about a room, a document or an item. Attendance verification is the third, and it is the one clients think of first, though it is arguably the least important of the three. A log built only for attendance verification usually fails at the other two.

Departure is rarely recorded, because signing out happens at the end of a shift when everyone is tired and the sheet is by a door nobody uses on the way out. Placement matters more than instruction here. So does making the log the same for every contractor, since a building running three different systems has no consolidated answer to the evacuation question.

Digital systems solve some of this and introduce their own problems, particularly where they depend on a phone, an app or a network connection in a basement. Whatever the mechanism, the test is the same: can somebody standing outside the building at nine at night, in a hurry, get a reliable list of who is inside. If not, the system is documentation rather than a control. It is also worth testing the system once, quietly, rather than discovering during an actual evacuation that the list is incomplete.

Name and company, arrival time, departure time, areas attended and a contact number. Five fields. Areas attended is the one most often omitted and the most useful later, because it narrows any question about damage or access to a specific part of the building rather than to the whole of it. Areas attended is worth capturing even in a simple paper log, because it converts a building-wide question into one about a floor or a wing.

Retention matters too. Logs are frequently discarded or overwritten within weeks, which is shorter than the period in which questions arise. Keeping them for a reasonable period, and keeping them somewhere retrievable, costs almost nothing. Clean Best keeps its own attendance record alongside whatever the building operates, so the information survives a change of building system or manager. Agreeing a retention period at the outset, and storing the logs by month in one place, makes that retrieval a two-minute task rather than a search.