Tablet kiosk visitor sign-in

Reception is a room with a job. Someone walks in out of the weather, they are early or late or lost, and in the first few seconds they need to understand where to stand, what to do, and that they have been noticed. A tablet standing on the counter does that work without anybody saying a word. It is lit, it faces the door, it has your name on it, and it is obviously the next thing to touch. Nobody has to be told to use it.

That is the quiet advantage of a screen. A poster waits to be chosen; a kiosk presents itself, holds the arrival’s attention for the thirty seconds the form takes, and can ask for things you would never get away with asking a person to do on the footpath: read a page of site rules, sign their name with a finger.

This is the part that separates a kiosk from software. An iPad or an Android tablet becomes the kiosk, and from the day you mount it, it is equipment. It needs a stand or a wall bracket at a height a person in a wheelchair can also reach, a power lead that is either hidden or accepted as visible, and wifi that reaches the front of the building rather than the far end of it. Pick the orientation before you drill: portrait reads like a form, landscape reads like a screen, and swapping later means new holes.

Device management is in the Core plan, which covers one location and one device: the front desk of a single site. The Professional plan is where a second tablet, a second door or a second building becomes possible, and it is also where the operational safety net lives: a device heartbeat so you can see the kiosk is alive, device alerts when it stops reporting, and a force refresh for the times a screen is showing something stale and nobody wants to walk over and restart it.

Those alerts matter more than they sound, because a kiosk fails silently. A tablet that has been unplugged by a cleaner, knocked face-down, or left on a wifi network that changed its password looks exactly like a tablet that is working, and the first anyone knows is a week later when the visitor history has a hole in it.

The kiosk is the one surface in the building where every visitor looks for half a minute, so it is worth it looking like yours. Custom branding (your logo, your colours, the fields you actually want on the form) is part of the Professional plan. A screen that matches the sign above the door reassures somebody that they are in the right building; a generic blue form does the opposite.

A screen can also change what it shows: walk a visitor through several steps in order, hold them on a page until it has what it needs, then confirm that they are signed in and their host has been told. Returning visitor lookup, in the Professional plan, is a small mercy at a desk in particular: typing a full name and company on glass is slower than writing it, and regular arrivals should not have to do it every fortnight.

The desk is also the natural place to put anything that has to be read and accepted before someone goes further into the building. Company policies and digital signature, both in the Professional plan, let site rules, an induction or a confidentiality undertaking be shown on the screen and signed with a finger, with the signature attached to that visit and timestamped. That is a materially better record than a laminated sign on the wall that you can only ever assert was read, and it is personal information under the Privacy Act 2020 like everything else on the form. How it, and the rest of what the kiosk collects, is protected is covered on our security page and in the privacy policy.

The badge, finally, is digital rather than printed: it is generated and emailed, so there is no label printer to buy, load or unjam. Digital visitor badge and visitor badge email are Professional-plan features. If your site’s rule is that every visitor must be wearing something visible on a lanyard, a digital badge is not that, and it is better to know now than at the demo.

Most reception desks are staffed some of the time and empty the rest of it: lunch, school holidays, the last hour of a Friday. A kiosk earns its keep in those hours, because it is the only thing still doing the job. The arrival signs themselves in, picks their host from host search, and the host is emailed on arrival (both in Core), so somebody knows there is a person in the foyer even though nobody greeted them.

Be clear-eyed about the limits, though. An unattended screen takes whatever it is told. It cannot confirm that the name typed into it is the visitor’s real name, and a kiosk is not access control: it records an arrival, it does not open a door or stop anyone walking past it. What it can do is keep the record honest: a duplicate visit guard stops the same person being counted twice when they tap through again, automatic sign-out closes the visits of people who walked out without touching the screen, and a blacklist in the Professional plan flags arrivals you have decided you do not want checking themselves in unannounced.

The emergency sign-in block is the most kiosk-shaped thing Entrica does, and it is in Core. A screen sitting lit in an empty foyer during an evacuation is an open invitation: a courier walks in through the door everyone has just left by, taps through the form, and adds themselves to the roll of people you are trying to account for. The block closes the kiosk while the site is being evacuated, so the list stops growing at exactly the moment it needs to stop growing.

The roll itself does not live on the tablet, which is the other half of the point. The evacuation list, emergency alerts and mark safe / self-safe are all in Core, and they open in a browser rather than on the kiosk, so whoever runs the evacuation works down the roll on their own phone, outside, while people are marked safe as they reach the assembly point. It does not matter that the tablet is on the other side of a fire door. Where reception is staffed, this is also where the desk earns its keep: the person who greeted most of these arrivals is the one best placed to read the remaining names out.

A kiosk does not make you compliant. The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 leaves the emergency plan, the wardens, the drills and the judgement about what is reasonably practicable with your organisation. The desk is one input to a plan you own, not a substitute for it. Those duties, and what the Privacy Act 2020 expects of the records a reception desk collects, are set out on visitor management systems in New Zealand.

A kiosk suits a building with one main entrance everybody comes through, a counter to stand it on, power and wifi within reach, and enough arrivals a day to justify a piece of equipment. It is the right answer when you want the entrance to look considered, or when visitors must accept something before they go in. It is the wrong answer when there is no desk to put it on, when there are four gates, or when the hardware would sit somewhere you would not leave a tablet overnight. In that case a printed code is the cheaper, tougher option, and QR code visitor sign-in is the page for that, and NFC visitor sign-in covers tap-to-sign-in tags. Many sites run a kiosk at the main entrance and codes or tags everywhere else.

What each plan includes is laid out in full on the features page, with the plans themselves on pricing. If another product is on your shortlist, our comparisons with other visitor management systems are sourced and dated.