Where is the logbook?
Your engineer arrives for a six-monthly fire alarm service at a small hotel. The logbook should be by the panel. It is not. The duty manager thinks the previous general manager kept it in the office. When it turns up, the last entry is your own service visit six months ago. There is no record of the weekly tests the hotel's staff are meant to do, no record of the false alarm last month, and no record of the contractor who disabled a zone for building work.
The engineer does the service, writes the entry, and notes to the customer that the logbook is incomplete. The same conversation happens at the next visit.
Why paper logbooks fail
The logbook is the customer's record, and keeping it is their responsibility under their own arrangements. But the paper format makes it easy to neglect, and the consequences land on your engineers when they need to understand what has happened to a system.
- Paper logbooks get moved, lost or replaced when staff change.
- Customers' staff forget weekly entries because nothing reminds them.
- Events such as false alarms, faults and isolations are not written down.
- Contractors working on site do not record their effect on the system.
- Your engineers see the logbook only when they are on site.
What a customer must record, and how often, is for them and their advisers. We are not advising on that. We build a better tool for recording it.
Why this matters to your business
When the logbook is incomplete, your engineers work with less information about how the system has behaved. Customers may turn to you when they discover gaps in their own records, and you want a way to help that does not mean filling in their book for them. A digital logbook is also a useful service you can offer, which sets you apart from firms that only turn up twice a year.
A shared digital logbook for each site
We build a digital logbook that you offer to your customers as part of your service, linked to your own site records.
- Each customer site has a logbook, with the system details from your records.
- Customer staff open it from a link or QR code by the panel and record weekly tests, events, false alarms, faults, isolations and contractor work, using simple forms.
- Reminders go to named people at the customer by text or email when their own chosen routine entries are due, based on what the customer tells you they intend to do.
- Your engineers add their service visits and any work they do, from the same record they use for the certificate.
- Before each visit, your engineer sees the logbook entries since the last one, so they know about any false alarms or faults.
- The customer can export or print the logbook at any time, and access is controlled by named users so entries can be traced.
| Logbook entry | Paper logbook | Digital logbook |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly test by customer staff | Often missed | Reminder, then quick form |
| False alarm | Rarely written | Recorded with time and cause |
| Contractor isolation | Seldom recorded | Recorded with who and when |
| Your service visit | Handwritten entry | Added from the visit record |
| Where it is | Wherever it was left | Online, by the panel via QR |
A service visit with the digital logbook
Before driving to the hotel, the engineer opens the site and sees that the weekly entries have been made most weeks, a false alarm was logged three weeks ago from a detector in a bedroom corridor, and a zone was isolated for two days during decorating. On site, the engineer checks that detector first, carries out the service and adds the visit to the logbook. The duty manager does not have to find anything.
What changes
Your engineers arrive informed. Customers have a record that does not get lost and is easier to keep up. You offer something practical that ties customers more closely to your service. And when a customer needs to show their logbook to someone else, they can produce it without a search through the back office.
Could your customers use this?
- Engineers often find logbooks missing or incomplete.
- Customers ask you to help with their logbook records.
- False alarms and isolations are not recorded between visits.
- Customer staff turnover means logbook duties get forgotten.
- You want to offer customers more than twice-yearly visits.