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You let a contractor crew in without a signing-in book by using a work list, meaning a named list of people tied to a contract with a from–to date range, and cards from a separate pool that stop working when that date range ends. Contractor staff are the most common gap in on-site presence records, because they don’t fit either of the two drawers the plant has ready: the employee records or the visitors.
Monday, six in the morning. Twelve people from a refurbishment contractor are standing at the gate, work starts at seven, and the maintenance manager hasn’t arrived yet. The gatehouse has two options: copy the names down with a pen, or phone round and hold the crew back. It chooses the first, because the second means a day’s delay in the refurbishment schedule.
Why neither an employee card nor a visitor card works
An employee card assumes a personnel record, an employment contract and an account in the HR system. Nobody is going to set all that up for a crew that is coming for two weeks.
A visitor card, on the other hand, is built for a different length of stay. A visitor comes for a meeting, hands the card back after an hour, and the visit is measured in hours. A contractor’s worker keeps the card for two weeks and comes back with it every day. When both groups draw on one pool, by nine in the morning reception has no cards left for visitors, because they are in the pockets of the refurbishment crew.
That leaves a third way, and it is the one usually chosen: a signing-in book, which works right up until the evacuation alarm goes off.
A work list with named people and cards from a separate pool
In TraxSystem a work list describes one contract: the company, the from–to dates, the site and the named list of people. Access expires with the end date, without anyone having to take anything back by hand or remember it in their diary.
The list of names rarely arrives in a convenient form. Usually it is part of an email or a spreadsheet filled in the contractor’s own way, so what matters most is being able to paste in text where the date of birth sits on the same line as the name. Entering a twelve-person crew then takes as long as copying it into a signing-in book, and those twelve people then appear on the list of people on site.
Cards for these people come from a separate pool and go back to it when the work is finished. Permissions travel with the card, so the crew gets exactly the access the contract provides for: the hall where they are working, and nothing beyond it.
The pass office sets up the list, reception issues the card
At most plants the pass office sets up the list and reception physically hands out the card. These are two different people at two different desks, and it is usually between them that things get lost: reception doesn’t know who it may give a card to, and the office doesn’t know whether the card has gone out yet.
The two steps are separate in the data as well. Assignment reserves the card for a specific person and takes it out of the pool, but doesn’t activate it yet, because between assignment and collection the card sits in a reception drawer, sometimes for several days. If it worked straight away, every swipe would record an entry in the name of someone who has never seen the card, and that name would end up on the list of people on site. The card starts working when reception confirms it has handed it to that person.
Reception also needs to see the lists valid today, along with the status of each person: which card they have, whether they have collected it, whether they have returned it and whether they are on site right now. It also has to be able to search by surname, because the person standing at the window doesn’t know what their company called the contract.
Being able to see the lists doesn’t have to mean being able to change them. The lists are still maintained by the pass office, and that is the right division: one person is responsible for who is allowed in, the other for who has been handed a card.
Returning cards on the last day of work
The work ends, the crew leaves, the cards stay in their pockets. After three contracts like that the pool is empty and nobody can say who has the cards.
That is why the last day of work should be treated differently from all the others: on that day the card can send its holder to the card return reader instead of opening the normal exit. The remaining cases are left to staff, because a card may be handed back in person, lost, or carried off by someone who followed a colleague out. In those cases one thing matters: releasing the card of a person who is shown as present must also close their visit. Otherwise the evacuation list keeps a person without a card, whom no reader will ever let out, because they have nothing to swipe.
What contractor records do not solve
Records don’t replace documentation. Medical checks, professional qualifications and job-specific training stay where they were. The system answers the question “who was on site and when”, not “were they allowed to work there”.
A limit on working days only sees your own site. If the same person is working for another client at the same time, no access control system will see it.
A card doesn’t confirm identity. Two people from the same crew can swap cards and a card system won’t detect it; this limitation applies just as much to employee cards.
No card issued means no record. A person let in by hand on their word won’t appear on the list of people on site, however well the work list is set up. Assigning a card won’t put them there either, until the person collects it.
See also: Contractor staff on site · People access control · What an evacuation list will not show