Local business Timehub has launched a contactless solution via smartphones to ensure visitors, employees and your business are safe.

What happens when a health and safety tool becomes a hazard? In post-pandemic times, that’s exactly what the traditional Visitor Log has become.

Businesspeople who visit other business premises are used to signing a paper Visitor Log when they arrive. Or using a communal screen. It’s a legal requirement. But what if that screen or pen and paper page is teeming with virus organisms?

So how do we sanitise a visitor book? It’s almost impossible to effectively clean a piece of paper. The pen is a vector for bacteria and pathogens. A touch screen can be wiped clean, but whose job is that? These were all the questions in the head of Steve Nathan a Hawkes Bay based software developer and he found himself thinking about how to do this better.

“It was an obvious flaw in even the best health and safety situations,” he says. “I was motivated by the idea of keeping our visitors, teams and businesses safe from this mostly unnoticed hazard.”

Steve and his partner Raymond Davey (both 25+ year veterans of the payroll and accounting tech space) came up with a “touchless” online product called MyVisitorLog.com, (a progression from their already successful business MyTimesheets, a tool to manage employee time and attendance via mobile devices) which simply requires all visitors to a business to use their own smartphones to log their visits. “A sign at reception tells them to long into their phones browser and follow a link. It’s failsafe in terms of eliminating that communal germ trough.”

A key feature is that there is no app to download, nothing to install, and the Cloud based backend system allows an administrator of the business to draw data about who has visited the premises, who they met with and how long they were on site. The immediate benefits for contact tracing in post-pandemic times were clear.

“The client can design specific questions for visitors to answer, which might gather phone numbers, health status or even health provider information. Should a visitor turn out to be unwell, it’s easy to follow who in the company they have had contact with, and where. MyVisitorLog.com will also display the businesses health and safety policies and requirements, so the visitor has this information on tap wherever they go on site.”

Another benefit is the ability to track visitors in an emergency, such as a fire or an earthquake. “It can be a major issue making sure everyone on site is accounted for. MyVisitorLog.com makes this a simple matter of logging in to the website from any connected device, to find out where any visitors are.”

While a visitor’s arrival and departure details are recorded when they are on the business premises, the system tracks nothing once they leave.

MyVisitorLog.com looks set to revolutionise the way companies manage their health and safety around visitors. With a modest monthly subscription, it’s a simple answer to a problem we’ve not had to consider in the past.