Industries · Offices
Access control for offices and buildings
One building, many tenants, several entrances - managed from one place. Access by company, by floor and by hour.
What makes it hard
A multi-tenant building is the awkward case
Nowhere else does one set of doors have to serve so many organisations that must not see each other’s space.
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Tenants who share only the ground floor
The company on floor 3 has no business on floor 7. Both need the lobby and the car park. Every rule has to hold two truths at once.
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Guests all day, every day
A building with twenty tenants takes dozens of visitors a day, each expected by a different company on a different floor.
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The hours nobody planned for
Someone staying until midnight and a contractor arriving at six for maintenance need different answers - and both need to be on the record.
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Cards that never come back
When a tenant moves out, some cards leave with them. A building run on plastic has a hole in it that is very hard to close.
Access hierarchy
Building, floor, tenant
Rules are set at three levels and inherit downwards, so the building manager never has to know the details of each tenant’s list.
Area Who may pass
- Main entrance and car park
- Everyone who works in the building, plus identified guests
- Lifts and floor lobbies
- Only the floors a person is entitled to reach
- Floor 3 - tenant A
- Tenant A’s people, and the guests they invited
- Floor 5 - tenant B
- Tenant B’s people, and the guests they invited
- Server room and storage
- Building management and IT only
Guests
A visitor pass in under a minute
The person expecting the visitor issues the pass. Reception does not become a queue, and the building still gets a record.
- 1
The host invites
Name, expected time, floor. Three fields, and the pass is created.
- 2
The guest gets a code
A single-use QR arrives by SMS or WhatsApp, valid only for that window.
- 3
They scan and walk in
The code opens the entrance and the lift for the right floor, with no detour past a desk.
- 4
The building records it
Name, arrival time and which office they came to, kept in the building log.
Out of hours
The four cases that come up every month
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Working late
Access continues automatically until a set hour. Past that it needs a manager’s approval, and either way it is logged.
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A contractor overnight
A single-use pass for two hours, scoped to one area, that expires by itself and leaves a record.
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Weekends and holidays
Closed by default. It opens only for the people a manager has named for that day.
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Something urgent
A manager opens the door remotely in seconds and gets an alert with the entry details, so the exception is visible rather than quiet.
For the building manager
What the front desk can see at a glance
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Who is in the building
A live count broken down by floor and by tenant - the number you need in the first minute of an evacuation.
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Each tenant runs their own list
A tenant adds and removes their own people, sets their own hours and invites their own guests. The building manager keeps the overall picture without touching anyone’s daily admin.
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Tenant status in one place
Active headcount, contract renewal date and permission state per tenant, rather than in a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand.
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Alerts on the unexpected
A failed attempt, an entry to an area with no rule for it, or a guest still on site past their window raises an alert immediately.
Joiners and leavers
The building follows the tenant’s HR system
Access is a consequence of employment, so it should change when employment does - not when somebody remembers to file a request.
- Someone joins
- HR adds them once. Building permissions are set from their role and their tenant, so day one works without a separate request to the front desk.
- Someone leaves
- HR closes the record. Every door in the building shuts for them at that moment, with no card to collect and no gap to explain.
Questions
Asked by building managers
- Can each tenant manage their own access?
- Yes, and it is the normal setup. Every tenant gets their own view covering only their areas: they add and remove people, set access hours and invite guests. The building manager sees the whole building without being pulled into each tenant’s daily changes.
- How long does it take to issue a guest pass?
- Under a minute. The host enters a name, a rough arrival time and the floor, and the system sends a single-use QR code to the guest by WhatsApp or SMS.
- What happens when a tenant moves out?
- The building manager closes that tenant’s profile in one click and every permission held by every one of their people ends at the same moment. There are no cards to chase and no forgotten keys to worry about.
- Can one tenant see another tenant’s data?
- No. Each tenant’s people, guests and logs are separated at the organisation level. The building manager sees building-level movement; a tenant sees only their own.
Walk your building with us
Thirty minutes on your floor plan and tenant list, working out the hierarchy before anything is installed.