Changing the front desk without a bad Monday.

Before you pick anything

• Write down who is allowed in without signing (staff, contractors with badges, board members) — this is your visitor policy and the new system has to match it, not the other way round.
• Decide what a screening match does: who is told, by what channel, and whether the visitor is held or turned away. Put it in writing before the first day.
• Count the front desks, and note which have a webcam, which have a label printer, and which have neither.
• Ask your current vendor, in writing, for a full export of visitors and visit history in CSV. Ask now; contracts sometimes make this slow after notice is given.
• Find your contract end date and the notice period. Put the notice date in a calendar with a reminder a month earlier.

Setting up

• Create the account and the first building. Name it what the staff call it, not what the letterhead says.
• Add the staff who will actually sit at the desk. Three logins is enough for most single buildings.
• Set the visit reasons (meeting, delivery, pick-up, contractor) to the five or six that cover 95% of your days. More is not better.
• Print a test badge on every printer. Check the photo is recognisable and the time is in your time zone.
• Import the visitor export. Names and phone numbers are enough; you do not need to carry over every historical visit.
• Generate one evacuation PDF with test visitors inside. Hand it to whoever runs drills and ask if it is what they would want in their hand.

The parallel week

• Run both systems for one full week on one desk. The new one is the record; the old one is the safety net.
• Sit with the desk for the first morning. Most friction shows up in the first ten check-ins, not the first hundred.
• Check Today's Check-ins against the physical count at the end of each day. If they differ, find out why before adding more desks.

Cut-over

• Pick a Monday. Remove the old system from the desk physically — a second screen that "still works" gets used.
• Tell visitors nothing. If they notice, something is wrong with the flow, not the announcement.
• Keep the old export somewhere two people can find. Then send the notice you diarised.