Glossary

Access register — the live record of who is on site. Its first purpose is the roll call; everything else is secondary and most systems are sold on the secondary uses.

For teams turning glossary into a repeatable record, cloud attendance tools provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside Chartered Institute of Building so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

Competence card — evidence that a person holds a qualification and has passed a safety test. Evidence of training, not of familiarity with a specific machine on a specific day.

Engaging company — the firm that brought a person to site, which may be several tiers below your direct subcontractor. A required field, because every incident investigation asks for it first.

Flow-down — the clause requiring a subcontractor to impose your obligations on anyone it engages. The only mechanism that reaches tier three, and frequently the clause that exists and was never passed on.

Induction — the site-specific briefing before first access. Expires when the site changes, which is at phase transitions rather than annually.

Permit to work — authorisation for a defined activity, place, period and set of precautions. Open permits at shift end are the commonest permit failure.

Prevailing wage — a minimum rate by trade classification on publicly funded work, evidenced by certified returns. Misclassification is the largest category of enforcement finding.

Temporary access — admission without full verification, under a written rule with an authoriser and an expiry. Without those three it becomes the process within a month.

Unmatched entry — somebody recorded entering with no corresponding exit. The single most useful number about a gate and almost never produced.

Terms used loosely

"Real-time register" describes a database, not accuracy. Ask what it shows at four in the afternoon.

"Biometric security" solves card sharing and introduces a substantially higher legal bar. It is a control for a measured problem, not a default.

"Compliant" describes your records and arrangements, never a product. No jurisdiction requires a particular system.

"Workforce management" in this market usually means a turnstile with reporting. The management is done by people.

How the collection is arranged

Foundations: who is on site and why the question is different in construction.

The register: the gate, the roll call, the diary.

Competence: cards, induction, plant and permits.

The chain: subcontract tiers and supplied labour.

Commercial: hours, invoicing, certified payroll, client requirements.

Safety: fatigue, welfare, incidents, briefings.

Practice: choosing, implementing, owning, and what goes wrong.

Legal: data protection and the archive.

Reference: the end state, the limits and this glossary.

On the absence of numbers

No costs are quoted, because they depend on site size, gate count and jurisdiction.

No ratios for welfare provision, because they are set locally and change.

No retention periods, because they derive from your contract and your law.

Every number worth having here is one you produce from your own site, and the notes say how to produce each.

Terms from the commercial side

Day rate — engagement by the day rather than the hour, which makes the gate question binary and the partial day the contested case. Define what constitutes a day in the subcontract or the record produces a number nobody agreed the meaning of.

Labour-only subcontract — supply of people without materials or design responsibility, common at the lower tiers and the arrangement where record-keeping is weakest.

Reconciliation — comparing invoiced hours against gate-implied hours and against supervision's knowledge. Three figures, rarely put side by side, and the exercise takes an afternoon the first time.

Social value reporting — contractual commitments on local labour, apprentices and training, measured from workforce records. The attributes have to be captured at enrolment because they cannot be reconstructed.

Terms from the safety side

Familiarisation — demonstrating competence on a specific machine, recorded against the person and the machine. A ticket is not familiarisation.

Phase change — the point at which the site becomes a different place and inductions, authorisations and welfare sizing all need revisiting.

Roll call — counting people at an assembly point against the register. The one use of the register that cannot tolerate an error rate.