Digital front desk logbook: instructions, shift handover, traceability

A digital front desk logbook is the desk’s time-stamped journal: instructions, calls, incidents and tasks, logged by the agent throughout the day and passed on to the next team. SmartCraft Building keeps it in the same tool as visitors, parcels and loans, with a shift handover screen and a service report that fills itself in with no retyping.

What is a front desk logbook?

It is the desk’s memory. Everything that happens at reception and needs to leave a record goes into it: a furniture delivery announced for 3 p.m., a lift out of service from 09:40 to 10:05, a call for the managing director to return, a key lent to a technician. It serves two purposes: passing on to the next team whatever is still open, and proving after the fact what was done, when and by whom.

On paper, it is a notebook sitting on the reception counter. In SmartCraft Building, it is a feed of events, each time-stamped and signed by the agent, and sorted by category: incident, instruction, information, task.

Why move it to digital?

Because a notebook reminds nobody of anything, can only be read at the desk, and has to be copied out to become a report. A spreadsheet is barely better: a cell gets overwritten without a trace, and nothing links the “key lent” line to the loans register.

Need	Paper notebook or spreadsheet	SmartCraft Building
Knowing who wrote what, and when	Signature and time by hand, sometimes forgotten	Every entry time-stamped and signed by the agent
Correcting a mistake	Crossing out, or an overwritten cell	Entry locked once validated, corrections kept in the history
Handing over the desk	Reading the notebook and a verbal briefing	Handover screen: instructions, tasks, parcels, expected visitors
Following up a task	A line you hope someone will reread	Due date, assignee, status and reminder
Attaching evidence	A photo on a personal phone	Photos and documents attached, a colleague can be mentioned
Reporting	A report copied out in the evening	Daily report and monthly dashboard, exports
Retention	Notebooks archived with no end date	Configurable retention period, logged purge

The shift handover screen

At the start of a shift, the incoming team opens a screen that sums up everything still open: current instructions, tasks to finish, parcels waiting, expected visitors. As an example, here is what the morning team might read there at 7 a.m.: two instructions, three parcels waiting, fourteen expected visitors.

Handover instructions say what needs doing, what needs watching and what needs passing on. They no longer depend on the memory of whoever is leaving, or on a two-minute conversation between two calls. The next team knows what the previous team left open, without having to ask.

Because the logbook shares the desk with the other registers, the handover screen is not limited to notes: a loan that has reached its due time or a parcel that has not been collected shows up there on its own, without the agent having to copy it across.

Calls, instructions, incidents

Calls. The call log records the caller, the person called, the type of call and the outcome. Types are configurable: transfer, message taken, enquiry, complaint, emergency. A message awaiting a callback notifies its recipient and stays tracked until it has been dealt with. Logging a call in under 10 seconds is a design target: the agent often has a visitor standing in front of them while picking up the phone.

Instructions and tasks. A task carries a due date, an assignee, a status and a reminder. An entry can have photos and documents attached, and can mention a colleague.

Incidents. An incident is entered in the feed, time-stamped and signed. Once validated, the entry can no longer be edited: a correction is still possible, but it leaves a history. That is what makes a logbook evidence rather than a rough draft.

Reminders. When a lent key has not come back by the agreed time, a reminder goes out automatically to the borrower and an alert is entered in the logbook.

From the register to the service report

Many front desks are run by a service provider on behalf of a client. The monthly report, meanwhile, is often pieced together by hand from notebooks and spreadsheets.

In SmartCraft Building, every action is logged once, at the desk. The contract’s KPIs follow from it: response times, volumes per time slot, late loans, rounds completed. The daily report goes to the service provider and feeds the monthly dashboard; reports can be scheduled by email and exported as PDF, CSV or Excel.

The provider’s agents log activity at the desk; the client — facilities management or the property manager — reviews the resulting KPIs. Everyone sees what their role allows, and nothing else. The monthly report is no longer a statement: it is an extract.

Traceability and retention

A logbook is a commitment: it has to be reliable and to last, without lasting forever. Every view, change or export is recorded in a tamper-proof audit trail. The retention period is configurable; five years is proposed as a starting point for the logbook, to be adapted to your sector and validated with your DPO. Purging is automatic and logged. More on handling personal data at the front desk: visitor log and GDPR.

Data is hosted in France or another European Union country, or stays in your building on an appliance: it is the same application either way. See deployment options.

Which tier includes the logbook?

The logbook, the call log and the loans register are part of the core: they are included from the Essential tier upwards, along with reporting, export and email notifications. Premium adds SMS, Teams and Slack notifications as well as the digital visitor journey. Security and enterprise, on quotation, adds SSO, SCIM, enhanced audit and the full API, among other things. Essential and Premium prices will be public at launch, with one licence per building: see the pricing tiers.

The logbook sits alongside visitors, on the same desk: see also our visitor management software.

See SmartCraft Building on your own front desk

Thirty minutes, on your real flows: who runs the desk, how the shift handover works, what your client expects every month. Book a demo.