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Replacing a paper sign-in sheet

What a clipboard by the door actually costs you, and how to replace it in an afternoon without buying hardware or issuing accounts.

Put a screen where the clipboard is. People scan a code with their phone and press one button, and the sheet becomes a table you can filter and export. It takes about five minutes to set up and needs no hardware you do not already own.

The reason to bother is not neatness. It is that a paper sheet cannot answer the questions you eventually need it to answer.

What the clipboard actually costs

It cannot be searched. “Was Priya in on the 14th?” means finding a box, then a page, then a signature you may not be able to read.

It is written by the person it is about. Anyone can sign for anyone, arrive at 09:40 and write 09:00, or fill in Thursday on Friday. That is not a character problem — it is what a form somebody fills in themselves always allows.

It only exists in one building. With two sites you have two sheets and no way to see both, and whoever needs the answer is usually at the other one.

It ends up retyped. Somebody keys the sheet into a spreadsheet at month end, which is an hour a month plus a typo rate, and the spreadsheet becomes the record nobody can audit back to anything.

What replaces it

A screen by the door — a spare tablet, an old phone, a TV, any device with a browser — showing a code that changes every thirty seconds. People point their camera at it and press one button. Nothing to install on their phone, and no account for you to create: they sign in once with the Google account they already have.

What you get instead of the sheet is a table: one row per person per day, first in, last out, filterable by date and location, exportable to CSV in one click.

The record you get instead

Every row carries a name you added, a time the server confirmed, and the location it happened at. It filters by date and by site, exports to CSV in one click, and answers “was Priya in on the 14th” in about two seconds.

A record people cannot write for themselves

This is the part a clipboard can never do. The code changes every thirty seconds, so it cannot be photographed and reused. Optional checks confirm the phone was at the location, or on the office network. And when one phone checks in two different people, that shows up as a pattern you can see on the day.

Every row is a time the server confirmed, at a place it can name — which is what turns a sheet of signatures into a record you can rely on.

Doing it this afternoon

Add a location, open the display page on any screen, paste in a list of names and emails, and scan it yourself to check. That is the whole of it — setting up in five minutes walks through it, and the demo is the same thing with the data already in it.

Still stuck? Try the demo — most questions here are quicker to answer by pressing the thing than by reading about it.