Site access log for contractors, suppliers and external companies

People who come to work, not to visit

The convenient label “external companies” covers very different groups: they stay for different lengths of time, come in through different gates, and need to be told different things. Separating them is the first step towards deciding what is worth asking at the gate.

Four groups, four different needs. A single form that asks everyone the same questions ends up asking too much of the person in a hurry and too little of the crew that stays a week.

Why a contractor is not an ordinary visitor

The difference is not a formality. A guest is greeted, escorted and walked back out: somebody is responsible for them for the whole visit. An external company, by contrast, works — often unaccompanied, in technical areas, with its own equipment, sometimes at hours when reception is not staffed at all.

That changes three very concrete things. First, who needs to know the person has arrived: not a generic “host”, but the manager who commissioned the work. Second, how long the presence counts as open: a visit lasts an hour, an intervention can last three days. Third, what you need afterwards: nobody goes back looking for a guest, but technical accesses do get looked up, often months later.

And then there is the reason nobody enjoys discussing, which is the real purpose of a log in the first place. If the evacuation alarm goes off tomorrow morning, the assembly point has to be able to account for people who are not on your payroll. A list that leaves them out is not an attendance list — it is half a list, and in an emergency half a list is worth very little.

This connects to a second question we handle elsewhere: how to keep these records separate from your own employees’ attendance. The guide on visitor logs and employee attendance explains why the two tools should stay apart instead of forcing one to do both jobs.

What to record when an external company arrives

There is no list that works for every company: it depends on the site, on the work carried out there and on internal procedures. One simple principle always applies, though, and it is also a data protection principle: collect what serves a defined purpose, not what “might come in handy”. Every extra field costs time at the gate and creates one more record to look after.

Once the fields are chosen, the real battle is consistency: the same data, in the same format, at every entry and at every gate. That is exactly what a sheet of paper cannot guarantee and a tablet can, because required fields stay required at six o’clock on a Friday too.

Guest, contractor, driver: what changes

It is worth putting the three situations side by side: the differences become obvious, and they suggest three distinct sign-in paths on their own, rather than one form that half suits everybody.

Setting up three separate paths does not make reception’s job harder — it makes it simpler. Someone dropping off a parcel answers three questions; someone opening a work site answers a few more, and neither fills in fields that do not concern them. For how this plays out on a production site with several gates, the subject is picked up on the page about visitor management in factories.

What stays outside the log

Here is something software vendors usually prefer not to say. An access log records who comes in and when: it is one component of the process, not the whole process. Before the gate opens there are checks and obligations that live elsewhere — in contracts, in coordination documents, in health and safety procedures — and no visitor log replaces them.

• Checking that the contracting firm is competent and suitable before the work is awarded: a contractual and documentary duty, not a form field.
• The coordination arrangements between client and contractor where firms share a workplace, including appointing a coordinator where that is required.
• Site induction and instruction for external workers: IRIGuest can record that information was acknowledged, but it is deliberately not a training platform.
• Tracking document expiry (insurance, certifications, competency records): that needs a dedicated system or an internal procedure, not an access log.
• Physical access control — turnstiles, barriers, proximity credentials — which belongs to access control hardware, a different product category altogether.

That said, the part the log does cover is the one that works worst in practice: the trail of who came in. It is also the only part you will be asked to produce when somebody says “who was in the plant on 12 March?”

Why the sheet at the gate does not hold up

The paper contractor sheet has one undeniable quality: it costs nothing and works during a power cut. It also has three weaknesses, and they all show up together at the worst possible moment — which is to say, when it is actually needed.

The first is legibility: a hurried signature at the end of a shift is unreadable forever. The second is incompleteness: on paper, the exit time is missing from every other row, because nobody walks back to the gate to announce that they are leaving. The third, and the most serious, is that the sheet shows every signatory the details of everyone before them — names, companies, times, reasons for the visit, on display to anyone passing the gate.

This is not an argument against paper as such — we devoted a whole guide to the comparison between paper, Excel and software, and for a small site paper may still be enough. It is an argument about volume: above a certain number of technical accesses, the sheet stops being a log and becomes a pile of sheets.

How to set up contractor sign-in

Setting this up takes half a day of thinking and a few minutes of configuration. The real work is deciding who gets asked what — the technical part comes afterwards.

The full flow, step by step, is described on the page about how visitor registration works. For external companies the content of the questions changes, not the mechanics: a tablet at the gate, self-service sign-in, everything else automatic.

Several gates, several sites, one history

On production sites the problem is rarely one gate: it is three. The office entrance, the goods gate, the vehicle access to the shop floor — each with its own story and, almost always, its own sheet. When someone asks who was on site on a given day, the answer has to be reassembled from three sources that do not talk to each other.

It is worth pausing on how long these records should be kept: holding them forever is not a cautious choice, it is a risky one. We wrote about it in the guide on how long to keep visitor logs. And if the first question on your mind is the budget, the answer is on the page about visitor management software cost.

Sources and references

Regulatory and institutional references for further reading. This page is informational and does not replace legal advice or the guidance of a competent health and safety adviser. Requirements differ by country: check what applies where your site is.

Frequently asked questions