Visitor management systems in New Zealand

A visitor management system is software that records who is on a site and when. Instead of a paper sign-in book at reception, people sign in by scanning a QR code with their own phone or by tapping through a tablet at the door; the system timestamps the arrival, tells the host their visitor is here, and keeps that person on a live on-site list until they sign out. Because the list is live rather than handwritten, it can be produced as an evacuation roll during a drill or a real emergency, and because each visit is a record rather than a line of biro, it can be searched, kept for a defined period, and deleted. Entrica is a visitor management system of this kind, built for organisations in New Zealand and Australia.

Entrica adds a third way in: NFC. The visitor holds their phone against a small tag at the door and the same sign-in form opens in their browser, with nothing to install and no camera to aim. We explain what NFC is, how tap-to-sign-in works, and when it beats a QR code on its own page.

The people it covers are broader than the word “visitor” suggests: clients waiting in reception, a courier at the loading dock, an electrician working in the ceiling, an auditor in for the afternoon, a job candidate, a parent at a school office. If they are inside your gate and not on your payroll, they are on the list.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, a PCBU (a person conducting a business or undertaking) has a primary duty of care. So far as is reasonably practicable, it must ensure the health and safety of its workers, and it must ensure that the health and safety of other people is not put at risk by the work it carries out. That second limb is the one that matters here. It covers everyone your work could affect, including the people signing in at your front door, and it does not pause because someone is only on site for twenty minutes.

Regulations made under the Act go further and require a workplace emergency plan: procedures for responding to an emergency, evacuation procedures, a way to communicate with everyone at the workplace during one, and testing of those procedures. In practice, testing an evacuation means standing at the assembly point and working out whether anyone is still inside. You cannot do that unless you know who came in. Many buildings also operate under an approved evacuation scheme, which adds the building owner’s own obligation to run trial evacuations and record them.

A paper book cannot produce that answer reliably. It only knows what people remembered to write, and almost nobody signs out, so by mid-afternoon the book lists people who left at 10am. It is one physical object, usually sitting on the counter you are evacuating away from, and the handwriting has to be legible to a stressed person in a car park. It tells you nothing in real time, and after an incident, including the kind that has to be notified to WorkSafe, it is a poor record of who was present and when.

A visitor management system changes the shape of that problem rather than removing the duty. The roll is already assembled, it is on the phone of whoever is running the evacuation, it includes the people who arrived after the person with the clipboard went to a meeting, and it can be checked off as people reach the assembly point. The obligation still sits with your organisation. The system is how you meet it and how you evidence it afterwards.

A visitor record is personal information: a name, usually a phone number or email address, often a company, the host they came to see, and the times they arrived and left. Some sites also collect a photo or a vehicle registration. All of it sits under the Privacy Act 2020 and its information privacy principles, and the obligations are not heavy, but they are real.

Collect only what you actually need for a purpose connected with running a safe site, rather than everything a form template offers. Tell people at the point of collection what you are collecting, why, and who holds it. Keep it secure. Do not hold it for longer than you need it: decide a retention period and be able to apply it. Be able to find, show and correct an individual’s record if they ask for it. And if a privacy breach happens that is likely to cause serious harm, you are generally required to notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the people affected.

This is where the paper book quietly fails a second time. Every person who signs in reads the names, employers, phone numbers and hosts of everyone who signed in before them. That is a disclosure nobody intended and nobody can undo, and it happens at the front desk of a great many New Zealand workplaces every day. A system that shows each person only their own form closes it.

How Entrica handles the records it holds is set out in our privacy policy and on the security page, which covers tenant isolation, encryption of personal information at rest, and the audit trail of who did what inside your account. We would rather point you at those than paraphrase them here.

Most products in this category can take a name at a door. The differences show up on the day something goes wrong, so it is worth testing a few specific things before you commit.

Ask to see the evacuation roll, not a screenshot of it. Can the person running the evacuation open it on their own phone, outside the building? Does it include staff as well as visitors, or only the front-door traffic? Can people be marked safe as they arrive at the assembly point, so the remaining list is the list of people to go looking for? Is there a version you can take with you if the network is unhelpful?

Check what happens when people forget to sign out. They will. Without an automatic end-of-day sign-out, or a sign-out QR code people can scan on the way past, the on-site list inflates over the week and the roll becomes a list of ghosts, which is arguably worse than no list at all because it sends someone back inside.

Decide who gets told, and how. Host notification on arrival is what makes the system stick, because it saves reception a phone call every time somebody walks in. Email is usually enough; SMS matters if your hosts are on a floor or a site rather than at a desk.

Look for retention and access controls. Who inside your organisation can read visitor history, can that be scoped to a single site, and is there a log of who looked? A system that treats every record as permanently visible to everyone makes your privacy obligations harder than they need to be.

Choose the doorway before the hardware. A staffed reception suits a mounted tablet; a yard, a gate or a site with four entrances is usually better served by a printed QR poster that costs nothing to duplicate. Plenty of sites want both. We have written up each approach separately; see QR code visitor sign-in, NFC visitor sign-in and tablet kiosk sign-in.

If people must acknowledge something before entry, record the acknowledgement. Site rules, an induction, a confidentiality undertaking: whatever it is, you want it attached to the visit, with a timestamp, rather than sitting in a laminated sign nobody can prove was read.

Entrica’s emergency capability is in the Core plan, not an upgrade. That is deliberate: the evacuation roll is the reason most New Zealand organisations start looking in the first place, and putting it behind a higher tier would be an odd thing to do.

Core includes the evacuation list (the live roll of who is currently on site), emergency alerts, mark safe / self-safe so people can be accounted for from the assembly point or confirm their own status, an emergency PDF you can carry out of the building, and an emergency sign-in block that stops new arrivals signing into a site that is being evacuated. Core also covers QR, NFC or tablet kiosk sign-in (one location, one device), sign-out, host search, host email on arrival, automatic sign-out and activity logging.

Company policies and digital signature, the pieces you need if visitors have to read and accept site rules or an induction before they go through the door, are in the Professional plan, along with pre-registration, digital badges, SMS notifications and multi-site support. The full split is on the features page, and the plans themselves are on pricing.

What Entrica does not do is make the decisions for you. It is a visitor management system, not a compliance programme: it records who is on site, tells hosts they have arrived, and gives you a roll you can act on. Your emergency plan, your wardens, your drills and your judgement about what is reasonably practicable remain yours. The system is the part that makes them workable on a Tuesday afternoon with a half-full building.