Choosing a System

Every product in this market records entries and exits. They differ in what happens around that.

For teams turning choosing a system into a repeatable record, learn more here provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside ISO standards catalogue so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

The register questions

Can a subcontractor enter their own people in advance, or does the site do all data entry?

How does a person get onto the register — who enters them, and what is required before access is granted?

Can competence expiry refuse access automatically?

Can the register be produced instantly, offline, at an assembly point?

That last one is the evacuation question and is the single most important thing the system does.

The chain questions

Can the engaging company be recorded per person, at whatever tier?

Can a subcontractor see and manage only their own people?

Can the system show the depth of the chain — who engaged whom?

Because a system that records people without recording who brought them answers half the question, and the other half is what every incident investigation asks first.

The competence questions

Which card schemes are checked electronically, and are the rule sets updated when schemes change?

Are expiry dates held and acted on, or only recorded?

Can plant and permit authorisations be held separately from access?

And can a person be refused for one and admitted for the other, which is the two-register design and which many products cannot express.

The practical questions

What happens in a power cut. What happens when the network is down.

Throughput per lane at shift start, with real numbers rather than a specification.

Weather rating, because readers live outdoors on construction sites.

And what it costs to move between sites, since the system will outlive this project and the hardware should too.

The data questions

What is collected, what can be disabled, and what is the retention per category?

Where is it processed and who at the supplier can see it?

What happens at project end: export format, deletion, confirmation?

And can an individual's record be produced on request across the whole project?

The trial

One gate, one month, at shift start.

Count the queue.

Raise a test evacuation and time the register.

Have a subcontractor enter twenty people and see how long it takes them.

And try to admit somebody with an expired card, which is the check that tells you whether the expiry enforcement is real or advisory.

Red flags

A demonstration that never leaves the entry screen.

Competence checking described as a feature without naming the schemes.

No offline register.

Biometrics presented as the default rather than as an option requiring justification.

And no answer on what happens to the data at project end, which is the question that reveals whether the supplier has thought past the sale.

The contract

Data export and deletion at project end, specified.

Scheme rule updates included rather than chargeable.

Hardware relocation terms.

And a response time for support during working hours, which on a site means from six in the morning rather than from nine.

Who should be in the evaluation

The site manager, who will live with the queue.

Whoever runs the induction, who will do most of the data entry.

A subcontractor, whose people will use it and who will be asked to enter data into it.

And whoever owns the commercial reconciliation, since the reporting is what they will rely on.

Evaluating it with procurement alone produces a good contract for a system nobody can operate at six in the morning.

Phasing across a project

The access requirement changes as a site does: a compound gate during enabling works, a different entrance once the structure is up, several during fit-out.

Which means the system has to move, and moving it has a cost.

Ask how relocation works, what it costs, and how long a gate is out of service during a move — because during that window the site falls back to paper, and somebody should have planned what that looks like.

The question that sorts the market

"Show me the evacuation view, offline, on a phone."

A supplier who demonstrates it in thirty seconds has built the thing the system exists for.

One who describes a report that can be exported has not, and the difference only matters on the day it matters.