Something goes wrong in a building. Water comes through a ceiling, a lift door gets scratched, a gate is left open overnight. The first thing anybody asks is who was in the building that day.
In most buildings the honest answer is that nobody wrote it down. There might be a book on the desk. Some contractors sign it and most do not. So when the question comes, the answer comes from somebody’s memory.
That is the whole problem, and Strata Check-In exists to close it. It keeps a record of which contractors came into the building, when they arrived and when they left. It does that one job and nothing else.
How it works
- A sign goes on the reception desk or the entry door. It is generated when you sign up and kept in your account, so you print it on the office printer, and when a sheet gets wet or goes missing you print another one.
- A contractor scans it with their phone camera and fills in three fields: the business name, their name and their mobile. No app, no account, no password. It takes about thirty seconds.
- Every Monday morning a report of who came, who left and when lands in your inbox, with a spreadsheet of the same week attached.
Signing out is where systems like this usually fall apart. Everybody signs in and almost nobody signs out, and a report full of people who never left is a report nobody opens. So each contractor gets a text with a one tap link to sign out. Anything still open at the end of the day is closed and marked as closed automatically, and the report tells you which is which rather than showing a time nobody entered.
What a building gets from it
You can answer the question. When something happens, the register answers who was here from the record rather than from memory. If you hold a caretaking agreement, that is the question that comes up. It records attendance, not the work itself.
The record turns up on its own. Monday morning, in your inbox, whether you remembered it or not. You can also log in and pull a report for any date range the moment somebody asks for one.
Nobody has to be taught anything. There is no kiosk to buy, no tablet to charge, nothing to mount on a wall and nobody coming to your building to fit anything. The sign is a sheet of paper and the contractor brings the phone.
It holds the least it can. Six things: business name, contact name, mobile, time in, time out and which building. A seventh, where in the building they are headed, only if you switch it on. No licences, no insurance certificates, no photographs and no identity documents. Holding a contractor’s certificate makes you the one who was relied on, so check those yourself, the way you do now.
You keep the record. The Monday email is yours to keep, forward to a committee or hand to an insurer, whether or not you are still a customer. The register itself is purged every 90 days, with one exception covered in the next post, so there is no growing pile of other people’s movements on somebody else’s server.
What it costs
$39 a month per building, billed yearly. That is $468 a year plus GST, or $514.80 including GST. A twelve unit walk-up and a three hundred unit tower pay the same. There is no charge per lot, per user or per sign-in.
There is no card form either. You sign up, I check the scheme number and email a tax invoice, normally the same day, and the building goes live the day the invoice is paid. The scheme number goes on the invoice because a strata manager will not pay an invoice that does not say which scheme it is for.
See it before you buy it
Both halves of it can be tried without a login. You can sign in the way a contractor would, and you can look at the manager’s screen, with a week of visits, the signage to print and the key register. Every name and time on both is made up.
Over the next two days I will post about the two parts people ask about most: the key register, and the screen that shows who is on site right now.
If you look after a building, send the building details through the site and I will set it up. If you would rather talk it through first, email hello@stratacheckin.com.au or ring 0459 180 897 and you will get me.