Most visitor management systems are designed for office towers: print a sticker, sign an NDA, click through three screens. In a coworking space that's noise. Your members' guests aren't spies; they're a friend's designer and a prospect's ops lead. The job is to make them feel expected, not interrogated.
Self check-in is the lighter pattern. A page on a tablet at the door, the guest types their name and who they came to see, and that person finds out immediately. No app to install, no clipboard, nobody stuck waiting at a desk for someone to look up. This playbook is the recipe: how to set the check-in point up, what happens on the day, what ends up in the log, and where door-access automation sits.
What LiteHQ does here today. An anonymous check-in page per workspace; a host lookup against your active roster; an email plus in-app notification to the host the guest picked; an escalation to your admins if that arrival is still unacknowledged after 20 minutes; a visitor log filterable by location; and a nightly job that anonymizes visitor details 90 days after check-in. It does not send guest invites, does not send SMS, does not capture NDAs or photos, and does not print badges. Where this playbook covers something we do not do, it says so.
Section 1
Why self check-in
theory · members + front desk
Self check-in wins on three dimensions: friction (nothing to install), attribution (the visit is tied to a named member rather than a signature nobody can read), and speed (the person being visited hears about it in seconds instead of when reception gets a moment). It loses on one dimension: nobody is standing there to make a guest fill it in, so the page has to be short enough that they will.
The three flows self check-in replaces
- The clipboard. Paper sign-in sheets. Lose data on day 1; lose compliance on day 8; lose member trust on day 30.
- The visitor app. 10MB download, account creation, push permission. Members' guests skip 60% of the time, so reception ends up adding them by hand.
- The pre-printed badge. Works in a tower; doesn't scale to a coworking space with 30+ visitors a day across multiple members.
Flow diagram
Audit your current visitor flow. If it requires the guest to install something, hand them paper, or wait at reception for a person, it's a candidate for replacement.
Section 2
Setting up the door
20 minutes, once · operator side
There is no invite step. Nothing is sent to the guest ahead of time and nothing needs to be booked first: the check-in point is a URL, and the whole setup is deciding which device sits on it. Copy that site's check-in link from its location page, point a spare tablet at it, leave the browser open, and that is the install.
The four decisions
- Which device, and where. Any browser works. The thing that matters is line of sight from where a guest naturally stops walking. A tablet behind the desk gets used a third as often as one in front of it.
- The workspace and the site on the URL. The check-in page carries both your workspace and which building this screen is in, and that pair is what attributes the visit to the right operator and the right location. The site is named by a code that only your workspace can issue, so treat the link like the key to that lobby screen: copy the one for this building, bookmark the full URL on the device, and if it ends up somewhere it should not be, replace it from the location page and reopen every screen on the new one. A link with the site missing will not file the visit at this building, and unless you run a single site it will not check the visitor in at all.
- Who can be picked as a host. The name field searches your active members and your own staff, after three characters, and only matches people who are currently active in your space. Nothing to configure; it is worth knowing that a member who has not accepted their invite yet will not be findable, and that anyone can hide their own name from these screens. A guest whose host is hidden, or who simply cannot find them, uses “I cannot find who I am visiting” and types the name instead, and reception is told rather than the individual. That path is the reason hiding yourself does not strand your own visitors in the lobby.
- What you want in the purpose field. It is free text and it is the only editorial choice you get. “Meeting, tour, delivery” as the hint gets you sortable data; leaving it blank gets you the word “Check-in” on every row.
What the guest fills in
Full name Daniel Reyes required Email daniel@acme.co optional Who are you Jordan Lee optional, typeahead visiting? Purpose of visit Meeting optional
Four fields, one of them mandatory. Resist the urge to ask for more: every extra field is another reason for a guest to walk past the tablet and wait to be noticed instead, which puts you back on the clipboard.
Check yourself in on your own tablet, as a guest would, and pick a colleague as the host. If the whole thing took more than about twenty seconds, the device is in the wrong place or the purpose hint is too vague.
Section 3
Day-of-visit experience
20 seconds · front of house · this is the part that matters
The guest fills in the four fields and taps check in. The person they named gets an email titled “Your guest Daniel Reyes has arrived”, branded as your space rather than as us, and an in-app notification saying the same thing. The visit is already in your log by then. The notification is best-effort by design: if the email provider is having a bad morning, the check-in still succeeds and the row is still written.
The three states an arrival passes through
- Notified. Email plus in-app, to the host the guest picked. Both channels are on by default and both can be turned off, per event, in notification settings. A guest who skips the host field checks in fine but notifies nobody, which is the one failure mode worth training reception on.
- Acknowledged. The host opening that in-app notification is what marks the arrival as answered. There is no separate “on my way” button to teach anyone; reading it is the signal.
- Escalated. Twenty minutes with nobody opening it and your operator admins get the arrival by email and in-app, once. This is the safety net for the host who is in a workshop with their phone face down, and it is the reason a guest does not end up sitting in your lobby for forty minutes.
The three states
Email plus in-app to the host the guest named.
Opening the in-app notification answers the arrival.
Operator admins are pulled in, once per arrival.
Have someone check in against you, then leave the notification unread and watch what lands twenty minutes later. Knowing what that escalation email looks like before it matters is worth the twenty minutes.
Section 4
What gets logged
ongoing · invisible to members · matters when it matters
Every check-in writes a row: the guest, the host they named, the location, the purpose they typed, and the arrival time. The visitor log in your workspace shows who is on site now plus the last hundred visits, filterable by location, and time on site counts from arrival to check-out or to right now if the visit is still open. Three properties worth knowing about, including one that is a limitation rather than a feature.
Three things to know
- Host-scoped, not global. The log shows visits to your own workspaces and nobody else's, enforced server side rather than by a filter in the page. A tenant admin cannot read another tenant's arrivals.
- Ninety days, then anonymized. A nightly job clears the name, email, phone and company from any visit older than 90 days and stamps the row as anonymized. The row survives so your occupancy history stays intact. This is the New Zealand Privacy Act principle on not keeping personal information longer than you need it, applied bluntly.
- The window is fixed. Ninety days is hard-coded in the job, not a per-tenant setting, so a space that wants thirty days or seven years cannot dial it in today. If your insurer or your regulator needs a different number, tell us before you promise it to them.
What a visit row holds
guest name Daniel Reyes cleared at 90 days email / phone daniel@acme.co cleared at 90 days host Jordan Lee kept location Northside kept purpose Meeting kept checked in 2026-05-21T14:01Z kept checked out 2026-05-21T15:42Z kept
There is no CSV export and no hash chain. If you need to hand a list to a fire warden or an insurer, read it off the visitor log; if that is a regular obligation for your space rather than a once-a-year one, say so and it will move up the queue.
Open the visitor log today, before you need it. Knowing which columns exist, and which ones vanish at ninety days, saves an hour at the wrong moment.
Section 5
Door-access automation (not available)
Not available today, and no provider is currently planned
LiteHQ does not integrate with any cloud door-access provider, and none is queued. If it existed, a check-in could trigger an unlock event instead of a person walking over, and the provisioning model would mirror what LiteHQ already does for bookings and memberships. It does not exist today.
Today the door is a human: the guest checks in, the host is notified, and somebody lets them through. Every check-in is still logged with its timestamp and host either way, so your record of who was in the building does not depend on whether a physical door is automated.
If automated door access matters to your space, email us at hello@litehq.com. Operator demand shapes the roadmap priority.
Run the check-in page as your primary flow for now, and write the one-line policy for who lets a guest through at 6pm when the host has gone home. That policy is the thing door access would eventually automate.
Section 6
FAQs
reception-ready · printable · 8 questions
The eight questions members and guests ask in month one. Memorise the answers; put them under reception.
Can I invite my guest ahead of time?
Not from LiteHQ. There is no guest invite, no pre-registration link and no SMS: your guest checks in when they get here. Send them the address yourself, the way you already do.
Does the guest need to install anything?
No. It is a web page on the tablet at the door. No account, no app, no password, and nothing installed on their phone.
My guest checked in but I never heard about it.
Almost always the host field was left blank, in which case nobody is notified. Otherwise check your notification settings: the visitor-arrived event has an email and an in-app channel, and either can be switched off.
The host is not in the list when I type their name.
Type at least three characters, and check the person is an active member or staff of this space. Invited-but-not-accepted members and removed members are deliberately not selectable.
Nobody came to collect me.
After twenty minutes without the host opening their notification, the operator admins get the arrival by email and in-app. Reception does not have to chase it by hand.
Can we ask guests to sign an NDA or take their photo?
Not in LiteHQ. There is no signature capture, no photo capture and no badge printing. If your space needs a signed NDA, keep that as a separate step at reception.
How long are visitor records kept?
Ninety days, then a nightly job clears the name, email, phone and company and keeps the rest of the row. The window is fixed, not a per-tenant setting.
Can I export the visitor log?
Not today. Read it in the workspace, filtered by location. If exporting is a regular obligation for your space rather than a once-a-year one, tell us.
Print this FAQ section and tape it under reception. Add the two questions specific to your space at the bottom; there are always two.
Key takeaways
Five things to keep, even if you remember nothing else.
- Self check-in is the lighter pattern. Nothing to install, four fields, one of them mandatory. It replaces the clipboard, the visitor app and the pre-printed badge.
- Placement beats configuration. The only real setup decision is where the tablet sits and what the purpose hint says.
- Three states. Notified, acknowledged, escalated. The twenty-minute escalation is what stops a guest waiting in your lobby.
- Ninety days, fixed. Visitor details are anonymized after ninety days and the window is not configurable. Do not promise an insurer a longer one.
- FAQ is reception's lifeline. Print it, tape it, update it monthly.