Three emails, two phone calls and a fob that is still live
One of your commercial clients has an access control system your firm installed and maintains. On Monday their office manager emails: new starter next week, please issue a fob with access to the ground floor and the car park gate. On Tuesday someone from their warehouse rings: can the goods-in door stay unlocked until six from now on? On Wednesday HR emails about a leaver whose fob needs cancelling.
Your engineer who knows the system does the fob and the door schedule remotely between jobs. The leaver email sits in the shared inbox behind a stack of lockout enquiries. A fortnight later the client asks why the leaver's fob still works. Nobody can say when the request arrived, who read it or whether the warehouse caller was even someone allowed to change door times.
Small changes, lots of them, and no process around them
Access control maintenance is less about the hardware and more about a stream of user and schedule changes. Each one takes minutes. Together they are a service that most locksmith firms run through a shared inbox and one engineer's memory.
- Requests arrive by email, phone and text from different people at the client.
- There is no list of who at each client may request changes.
- Requests are done between jobs, with no record of when or by whom.
- Leaver cancellations wait behind urgent work in the same inbox.
- Chargeable changes are not recorded, so they are never invoiced.
How the client's system is designed, and what their own access policy says, are for the client and your engineers. We deal with the requests and the records.
Awkward questions and unbilled work
When a client asks about a change, the answer should be quick and exact. Without a log it is a search through emails and a conversation with the engineer. Changes made on the say-so of someone who was not authorised put you in a difficult position with the client. And many firms quietly give this work away, because nobody records the changes that the maintenance contract does not cover.
A change request log for each access control client
We build a request log that sits beside your job system and fits the way your engineers already make changes.
- Each client has a list of named people who may request changes, and what each may request, agreed with the client.
- Requests come in through a short form or a dedicated email address. Emails are read automatically into the log, and the sender is checked against the list.
- Requests from someone not on the list are held and the client's main contact is asked to confirm before anything is done.
- Each request has a type (new user, cancel user, change access, change schedule, fault), a priority you set, and leaver cancellations go to the top.
- The engineer marks the change done from their phone, with a note of what was changed, and the requester gets a confirmation.
- Changes outside the maintenance contract are flagged as chargeable and passed to your accounting software as invoice lines at the end of the month.
| Question from the client | Answered by |
|---|---|
| When did you get our leaver request? | Time the request was logged |
| Who asked for the door schedule change? | Requester on the log, checked against the list |
| When was it done, and by whom? | Engineer's completion entry |
| What are we being charged for? | Chargeable changes listed on the invoice |
| What changed on our system this year? | Client's request history |
Clients get exact answers, and you get paid for the work
Each request has a clear owner, a time and an outcome. Leaver cancellations are handled first because they are marked as urgent. When a client asks what happened, the office opens the log and answers in a minute. And chargeable changes stop disappearing into goodwill, which often turns a maintenance contract from barely worth it into proper work.
On an ordinary day the engineer checks the list between jobs, works through the few open requests, taps each one done, and the clients hear back without anyone in the office having to chase.
Does your access control work run like this?
- Client change requests arrive in the same inbox as everything else.
- You do not have a list of who at each client may ask for changes.
- A leaver's fob has stayed active longer than the client expected.
- You could not list the changes made for a client last year.
- Chargeable changes are rarely invoiced.