Staff and contractors: access groups without the spreadsheet

The problem with the spreadsheet

In many condominiums, the record of who works in the building lives in a spreadsheet, a notebook at the front desk or the superintendent's memory. Enrollment on the terminals happens person by person, door by door. It works as long as the team is small and nobody changes.

The problem shows up over time. The contractor whose contract ended still has access. The new staff member was enrolled at the main entrance but not at the service entrance. The outsourced company replaced half its crew and only mentioned it over the phone. And nobody can say for sure who can still open the garage gate.

Think in groups, not individuals

A simpler way to organize it is to create access groups. Each group represents a role in the condominium and comes with a set of doors. For example:

• Residents: every door.
• Staff: service entrance and technical areas.
• Pool crew: service entrance and recreation area.
• Building maintenance: garage and machine room.

When someone joins the team, you just add them to the right group, and they get access to that group's doors. When they leave, you just remove them, and their access disappears from every door at once. Exceptions are still possible: a person can be given one extra door individually, without creating a group just for them.

Another advantage shows up when the condominium changes. If a new door is installed in the technical area, you just add it to the maintenance group, and every member gets access to it, with no need to enroll anyone one by one.

Expiration dates: access that ends on its own

Contractors almost always have an end date: a three-week renovation, a six-month contract, work on the party room. Enrolling them with a start date and an end date means you don't depend on someone remembering to remove their access later.

For permanent staff, the end date can stay open, but revoking access has to be part of the offboarding process. Just as you collect the uniform and the keys, you remove the access, on the same day.

Keep the person's record separate from their access

Another helpful habit is keeping a complete record for each person, with an ID document, and treating access as something you grant and revoke. That way, a contractor who comes back the following year doesn't turn into a duplicate record, and the information about who they are stays in the right place.

It also helps to record which company each contractor comes from and who in the condominium authorized them to come in. When a company changes its crew, it's easy to see who needs to be removed and who needs to be added.

Agree on a notice rule with outsourced companies

A lot of forgotten access starts with a crew change nobody communicated. Agree with every company that provides services to the condominium that it will send formal notice, by email or in writing, whenever someone leaves or joins its crew. That notice becomes the trigger to update the access group the same day, and it makes clear whose responsibility it is if the notice never comes.

What about schedules?

Many condominiums also want to limit the hours when staff and contractors can come in, for example to weekdays only. It's worth discussing that rule with management and asking, when you're choosing a provider, how the system and its terminals handle it. Even without time restrictions, expiration dates and frequent group reviews already go a long way toward reducing the risk of forgotten access.

A review routine

Well-organized groups still need attention. A short monthly routine takes care of it:

• Review who is in each group.
• Check which contractors have access expiring in the next few weeks.
• Compare the staff list with payroll or with the outsourced company's roster.
• Look at the denials in the access history, which often reveal forgotten or expired records.

How Abriu handles it

With Abriu, access groups such as Residents or Staff give their members every door in the group, and a person can also be given doors individually; their final access is the sum of both. Members are added through a search, up to 500 at a time, and removed in bulk. Contractors have their own kind of record, with an expiration date.

Each person has a single record per ID document, matched on the number with punctuation ignored, to avoid duplicates. Anyone who is deactivated or deleted is removed from every terminal, and each change becomes a verified push to each device, with the dashboard showing what arrived and what failed, and the option to try again.