It’s important to know who’s welcome in your office, and more importantly, who’s not. Especially in large buildings and as companies grow, it’s not always easy to know who’s authorized.

Many of our core features can be used to enhance workplace security. This article outlines the top ways you can use Envoy Visitors to identify and protect your workplace from unauthorized visitors.

When a visitor signs in, their entry appears on the visitor log. Because this dashboard can be accessed by any administrator from any computer, it’s the best way to keep everyone in the loop about who’s on-site. In the event of a security incident, you’ll only need to check the dashboard to see who was on-site at the specified time.

Available on all paid plans

Having a streamlined badge system in place is the easiest way to identify unauthorized visitors. It’s easy to require each visitor to wear a badge—and when you see someone without one, you can promptly take steps to determine if they’re welcome in your building.

You can choose to display details like their photo, host’s name, Visitor type, entry time, date, and more. Custom badges add another layer of security since your front desk is the only place you can receive a badge with your custom design. Or, opt for expiring badges, which present a “VOID” design after 24 hours.

To increase security, many workplaces do not allow walk-in visitors and instead have an “invite-only” policy. Registration makes it easy to enforce this policy since any employee can create invites within Visitors. When an invite is created, it appears on the invites dashboard. Since admins can see invite details, like who created the invite and the private notes, it’s easy to know a visitor is authorized. Learn more about registration.

Envoy allows admins to Deny Visitors or Get notified for any responses recorded during the Sign in process. Rules are defined for each sign in field and can be customized to either deny the visitor directly and/or to get notified when the visitor chooses certain answers. This way, they can create smart workflows for the sign in process. Learn more about setting up Sign in flows with rules

Any employee who’s assigned to the Security Admin Role will have read access to a special security dashboard that shows the day’s invited visitors. This way, they can see who’s expected and authorized to visit that day.

To ensure that your Envoy account and sensitive visitor information is protected, we provide a live shareable link with the current day’s invites for external security guards. Instead of requiring an Envoy login, you can use this special URL with read-only access to the same security view of invites as the Envoy dashboard. This link allows security staff who are not in your employee directory to see who’s expected and authorized to visit that day.

As an added security feature, this link will be disabled by default and can be enabled at your convenience.

To turn this on go to Visitors > Settings > Invites > Enable on Security desk link.

Note: If you ever need to generate a new link, click Regenerate, and it will break the old one.

Available on Envoy Premium & Enterprise Plans

You can capture a photo of each visitor during sign-in. These photos appear on your dashboard, in host notifications, and on the visitor badge. They’re securely stored and will always be there if you need them. Learn more about photos.

Available on the Envoy Enterprise Plan

Prevent specific people from receiving invitations to visit or coming on-site by adding them to your block list. If a visitor on your block list tries to visit, they won’t be allowed to enter until one of your Envoy administrators approves their visit. Learn more about the block list.

Available on the Envoy Enterprise Plan

The following integrations give you the best of both worlds: It allows visitors to have the easy, welcoming experience of signing in on the iPad, while your security team reaps the full benefits of your Access Control user management such as badge provisioning, security alerts, and more.

When you connect your access control system, Envoy will send a record of every visitor who signs in on the iPad into the third parties event log. Envoy will automatically create an identity or personnel record for each new visitor. Learn more about our Access Control integrations.