What Is a Sign in and out Sheet?
A sign-in and out sheet is a document for recording attendance. Its main purpose is to document the comings and goings of visitors and staff at a company and event for safety reasons. Guests and employees usually encounter a sign-in sheet in the reception area or the main point of entry. Before a visitor is allowed to enter an event, he usually has to fill out some personal information, such as name, address, phone number, and reason for attending.
This article briefly discusses the following points:
1. Why use a sign in and out sheet
2. Tips for creating a structured sign in template
3. The importance of an attendance sheet
4. When a sign in and out sheet should be used
5. Technology to create a sign in and out sheet
Why Do Organizers Use a Sign in and out Sheet?
A sign-in/sign-out sheet is used to collect information and improve security by prompting visitors to identify themselves. A typical visitors sign-in sheet for a company building will include the name of the visitor, the name of the company/organization they wish to visit, the date of the visit, the time of their arrival, the time of departure, and their signature.
In event management a guest sign-in sheet is created online to update a guest list with all necessary information. This speeds up the registration process, avoids confusion, and doesn’t create additional work for the organizers.
A sign-in/sign-out sheet can also be used by HR personnel to track employees’ working times by recording their arrivals and departures. At exclusive events, reception staff use event sign in sheet templates to ensure that only invited guests are admitted.
How Do I To Make a Sign in and out Sheet
Modern times offer new and innovative ways to create a sign-in and-out sheet. Technology makes it faster and easier than ever before. As with the paper forms of the past, however, there are a few things to consider. You should include the following points in every sign in template:
1. Only Necessary Information Should Be Requested
A sign-in/sign-out sheet must only contain the necessary information, depending on the intended use. The processing time should not exceed more than a few seconds.
2. An Authenticity Check Must Be Included
A sign-in and sign-out sheet should ask for the visitor’s signature to confirm the authenticity of the information. A digital visitor’s sign-in sheet may also require the visitor to provide a photograph of himself as an additional safety measure when logging in.
Why Is a Sign in and out Sheet Important?
The purpose of a sign-in sheet is not to go all, “Big Brother is watching” on you. Most of the time, a business won’t contact you unless there’s a good reason for doing so, such as an emergency event. Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to the sign-in/out sheet than just safety, although it is still an effective way to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to buildings and/or events.
Below, we’ll review some of the lesser-known benefits of this particular log:
1) Organization
Staying organized is a must if you’re running a business, but when people think of organizational methods, most often visuals of planners, filing cabinets, and post-it notes come to mind. Most people wouldn’t consider keeping track of people as an organizational strategy, but it is. In fact, it can save HR a couple of headaches when they’re scheduling interviews, and it can save businessmen a lot of precious time when scheduling meetings with third-party investors or clients. After all, time is money, and capitalizing on optimal efficiency is a good way to save some.
2) Create Future Guest Lists
It’s every organizer’s dream to already have a pre-existing, perfectly curated guest list for the event they’re planning to host. For charity events, you wouldn’t want to invite people who don’t have a penny to their name. You want to go for the big-ticket investors, people who can put a dent in your fund-raising goals.
You can recycle old event sign-in and out sheets of previous, similar events to bulk up your attendance outcomes. It’s all about working smarter, not harder. With attendance sheets, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel but borrow an axel from one that’s already in motion.
3) Structure During an Emergency Events
Not surprisingly, emergency events rarely result in a calm, orderly exodus of everyone in the building. Sure, that’s what everyone trains for in a scheduled fire drill, but everyone usually has a pretty good idea of when those take place, especially if there’s no strong smell of smoke in the air.
Because emergency events usually end in chaos, attendance sheets can add a semblance of order to an already hectic, high-stress situation. Having a list of everyone who’s physically in the building can also function as a roll call list for everyone who should be out of the building in the event of an evacuation. At the same time, you won’t have to worry about adhering to OSHA’s safety regulations because you’ll already meet the criteria of emergency preparedness. It’s a win-win situation.
4) Adherence to Legal Requirements
In some cases, organizing an official sign-in/out log is mandatory. This is a precaution mainly observed in industries where fraud or abuse is common, like government operations, contractors, or the financial sector.
If your company ends up getting audited, you can come prepared with physical evidence to hand over to the authorities.
Signing into an event or out of a building isn’t the most exciting thing on the agenda, true. You might even dread having to take the extra minute to sign your name, fill out your contact information, and make small talk with the receptionist. But it’s really in your best interest to do so, and it’s not just so the event organizers can spam your email later requesting donations. There are many safety benefits of keeping track of who enters and leaves the premises of your company or event. Anyhow, as was already mentioned, that’s not the only advantage. In fact, this little, previously underrated sheet probably serves more functions than you ever thought possible.
When Should I Use a Sign in and out Sheet?
At first glance, you might wonder why a tablet is set up on a stand right front and center in the middle of a hotel lobby. However, in most cases, the use of a sign-in/out sheet is self-explanatory. You walk into a company building, and you’re immediately confronted by a sign-in station and a security guard wanting your credentials and the reason for your visit. The reason is obvious: to ensure the safety of everyone in the building from those who might seek to do harm.
Besides safety, you can use these logs in the following scenarios:
Restaurants
During the height of the pandemic, a lot of companies employed the use of such a log to do contact tracing in case a staff member or guest tested positive for the highly contagious covid-19 virus. In this way, it allowed businesses to reopen when they otherwise would have had to stay shut down.
Hotels
Hotels need to know which guests have checked in and what rooms are occupied. The same goes for when they check out. How else will the cleaning staff know which rooms to clean? Or which ones to prepare for the next guests?
Hospitals
This one goes without saying. Hospitals have to know the exact identity of everyone who enters their facility. For hospitals, a sign-in and out sheet is especially important to not only get the necessary patient information and insurance number to be able to properly treat them but to also know how many beds they have left available. If it’s crowded in the ER room, which is almost always is, patients are treated according to triage, meaning the most critical patients receive care first. That’s why it’s so important to know who checks out and when. The sign-out sheet can literally save lives.
Charity Events
As already mentioned, knowing who’s in attendance can help prepare the guestlist for the next event. But it also lets organizers know if they are still in compliance with the fire code. Obviously, only so many people are allowed in a particular building or room at a time so no bottleneck at doors occurs in the event of a fire. If OSHA deems a party has violated this rule, they can incur heavy fines.
Government Buildings
The government, probably more so than any other company out there, is all about documentation—maybe a little over the top in most cases. They want a paper trail and for good reason. It’s the people’s government, and they have a right to know what their politicians are up to. A formal document such as a sign-in sheet keeps them honest. Imagine the scandal if an important politician was caught partaking in insider trading, and it only came out because a sign-in was the last nail in the coffin.
How Can Technology Be Used To Optimize Your Sign in and out Sheet?
Company visitors or event participants can register online easily with a sign-in and sign-out sheet. With Lumiform’s mobile app, you can let visitors fill out any type of registration form online using a tablet or smartphone . Even if the internet goes down, you can still access and save information to the template offline. Later, you can use our desktop software to analyze the data you collected on site. In this way, you can reduce the risk of security breaches, documentation errors, and mix-ups.
By digitizing a traditionally paper-based process, you can save time and paper and keep the error rate to a minimum. The flexible form construction kit helps you convert any individual paper list into digital checklists within minutes. No time for conversion? Lumiform offers pre-designed templates so you can get started quickly. Here you will surely find the right sign-in/sign-out sheet for you. The digital tool also offers you many other advantages:
- Get real-time data via your digital sign in and sign out sheet. This way you can easily track the attendance of staff and participants.
- Get an overview of everything that is going on in the field.
- Registration and guest lists are created automatically – this saves you from having to do the postprocessing manually..
- Increase the efficiency of your internal processes: Report discrepancies in registrations immediately to teammates and solve problems faster than ever before.
- With the help of the flexible form construction kit, you can constantly optimize every sign-in and sign out sheet online or offline.
