Know who is on campus. Every entry timed, every refusal on record.
A digital visitor register for Indian schools, built for a guard with a queue in front of the desk. Type a phone number and a returning visitor fills in, while the gate board shows how many visitors are inside, who has overstayed and who was turned away. The register runs across academic years, prints for any dates, and keeps only the last four digits of any ID.
The gate before a school visitor management system
Ask a principal why she started looking for a school visitor management system and the story usually begins on a busy Saturday. It is parent-teacher meeting day at a CBSE school in Kanpur, and the guard at the main gate has a ruled notebook, a pen tied to the desk with string, and a queue. Parents arrive in threes and fours, and he writes one name for each family, or none at all when the line backs up to the road. A courier carries two cartons of books towards the office, and an electrician comes for the generator. A man who says he is from the water-purifier company walks in while the guard is still writing down the courier.
At half past one the principal wants to run the fire drill postponed in the morning, and she asks the gate a simple question: how many visitors are inside right now? Nobody knows, because the notebook has names without times, times without names and no time out for the courier who left at noon, while the two people the guard sent back were never written down at all. A week later a parent complains about a stranger near the junior wing, and the principal opens the book to find a smudged entry and a photocopy of somebody's Aadhaar card clipped to the page, a document the school never needed to keep. When the question is who was on campus, when, and who let them in, a paper register offers a guess, and a guess is the most expensive thing a school can hand a worried parent or an inspector.
If this is your gate, the guard isn't the problem. A register nobody can count, search by date or trust at three in the afternoon isn't a record. Inkwelly Visitors & Gate turns the book at the gate into one: every entry timed and tied to a purpose, every refusal written down, and the number of visitors on campus on one screen.
What Inkwelly Visitors & Gate actually replaces
Visitors & Gate covers everyone who comes through the school gate without studying or working there: parents coming for a meeting, families enquiring about admission, a parent collecting a child early, delivery staff, electricians and plumbers, officials on an inspection, interview candidates, alumni and guests on an event day. It replaces the hardbound visitor register, the guard's memory of who went out, the handwritten token numbers and the end-of-day guess about who never signed out. Every visit becomes one entry with a gate pass number, a purpose, a time in and, when the visitor leaves, a time out, and nearly every entry names the person the visitor came to see.
It records visitors, not the school's own people: students and their parents' details stay in Student Information. It is also its own module rather than a corner of the hostel software, because every school has a gate and most schools don't have a hostel. And it is deliberately small. The guard at 8:30 in the morning has a person standing in front of the desk, so check-in asks for a phone number, a name, a purpose and whom they are here to see, and leaves the rest optional unless your school decides otherwise.
What the gate stops doing
- Writing one name for a family of four and losing track of how many people actually walked in
- Copying full Aadhaar numbers into a notebook that lies open on the gate desk all day
- Clipping photocopies of visitors' ID cards into the register and keeping them for years without a reason
- Leaving the time-out column blank and discovering at six in the evening that nobody knows who is still inside
- Turning somebody away and writing nothing down, so on paper the refusal never happened
- Asking a parent who comes every fortnight, or the Monday courier, to spell their name all over again
- Reading every page of today's register to answer how many visitors are on campus during a drill
- Hunting through last year's books in the store room when an inspector asks about one date
- Starting a new register every April and splitting one continuous gate record into loose volumes
- Letting a visitor in without writing down whom they came to see, because the column was optional
The screens the gate desk works from
A lot of visitor management software for schools in India is a separate app, often with its own tablet and its own login. This is not that. It is three screens inside the portal your office already uses, and they match how a gate actually runs. The gate board is the module's front page, open all day at the desk: who is inside, who has stayed too long, and the buttons to check people in and out. The movement register is the book an inspector asks for, for any dates you choose, ready to print. Gate policy is where the principal or administrator sets the pass prefix, the overstay limit and whether an ID check is compulsory. All three are in English and Hindi, and each person sees only what their role allows.
Everything the gate register does
Gate board
The screen the desk keeps open all day. Four figures sit on top: visitors on campus and the entries they came in on, anyone past your time limit, today's arrivals and today's refusals. Everyone inside is listed below, earliest arrival first.
Check-in by phone number
The phone number is the first box. When somebody who has visited before is typed in, their name, company, vehicle number and ID details from the last visit fill in, without overwriting anything the guard has already typed.
Eleven visit purposes
Parent meeting, admission enquiry, picking up a student, delivery, maintenance, official inspection, interview, hostel visit, event guest, alumni and other, listed in the order a school gate actually meets them, with parent meeting ready as the default.
Whom they came to see
Every entry records whom the visitor came to see, in the desk's own words, such as "Class teacher, 6-B" or "Accounts office". Only deliveries, maintenance visits, official inspections and "other" may leave it blank.
One entry per family
A family of four is one entry with four people, the way the paper book is written. The board adds up people rather than entries, so the figure at the top is how many visitors are really inside, not how many lines were written.
Last four digits, nothing more
The guard notes which ID was shown, from Aadhaar, driving licence, voter ID, PAN, passport, employee ID or other, and types only its last four digits. The box won't take a fifth, and no image of the card is ever stored.
One-tap check-out
Check-out sits on each visitor's row on the board, with one confirmation, because it is the action a gate repeats most. The time out and the length of the stay go straight into the register, worked out by Inkwelly, not by hand.
Overstay flag
Set a limit anywhere from 1 to 24 hours; it starts at 4. Anyone still inside after that turns red on the board, with how long they have been in. Nobody is ever signed out automatically, so the register records what really happened.
Refusals on record
When the gate turns somebody away, the desk writes down why and the entry closes as turned away. It stays in the register with its reason, and the board counts today's refusals next to today's arrivals.
Gate pass numbers
Each entry gets its own pass number, such as VIS/2026-27/00001, with your school's prefix, starting again each financial year. Two desks saving at the same moment still get different numbers, and a failed save never leaves a gap.
Movement register
Choose any dates and see every entry in order: pass number, name, phone, purpose, whom they met, time in, time out and how long they stayed, with totals by purpose. One button prints it for the office file.
Gate policy
The principal or administrator sets the pass prefix, the overstay limit and whether an ID check is compulsory for every visitor. The ID check starts switched off, so it is your school's decision, not the software's default.
A digital visitor register the guard can keep up with
The biggest reason gate registers fail isn't dishonesty. It is the queue. At ten to eight the gate has parents dropping children, a van with milk for the canteen and somebody's husband with a forgotten tiffin, and anything slower than a pen gets skipped. Inkwelly's check-in is built for that moment. It is one short form, it opens with the phone number because that is the quickest thing to ask for, and it fills in what the register already knows about people who come often. One tap saves it, and the gate pass number and the time in are added at that moment, so nobody has to look at a watch or count pages.
Phone number first, and regulars fill themselves in
The first box on the check-in form is the phone number, and on a phone or tablet the number pad opens for it. As soon as ten digits are in, Inkwelly looks for an earlier visit from that number. If it finds one, it fills in the name, the company, the vehicle number and the ID details from the last visit, and shows a small note saying the details came from last time. It only fills boxes that are still empty, so nothing the guard has already typed is overwritten. For the mother who comes every fortnight, the courier who delivers every Monday and the electrician on an annual contract, check-in shrinks to confirming the purpose and whom they are seeing. That single change decides whether a register actually gets filled in.
Purpose and whom they came to see, in plain words
The purpose list is in the order a school gate meets people: parent meeting first, then admission enquiry, picking up a student, delivery, maintenance, official inspection, interview, hostel visit, event guest, alumni and other. The "here to see" box takes whatever the desk would write in the book, such as "Class teacher, 6-B", "Accounts office" or "Principal". It is required for every purpose except deliveries, maintenance, official inspections and other, because who let a visitor in and whom they were seeing is the question a register exists to answer. Company or department, badge number, vehicle number and a short note are there when they help, and never stand between the guard and the save button.
A family is one entry, and people are the headline
Indian families rarely visit a school alone. A mother brings her mother-in-law and the younger child, and a PTM Saturday brings whole households. Inkwelly writes them the way the paper book does, as one entry with the number of people on it. The People box starts at one, and the board and the register both add up people, not entries, so the board might read eleven visitors across six entries. When the principal runs a fire drill, and our fire safety compliance guide for schools covers how often that should happen, the question is how many outsiders are inside. The answer she needs is a number of people, not a number of lines somebody wrote.
Badges and vehicles on the same entry
If your gate hands out numbered badges or visitor cards, the badge number goes on the entry and shows beside the visitor's name on the board. At closing time the desk can see at a glance whose badge hasn't come back, because anyone still checked in is still on the board with it. Vehicle numbers are saved in capitals however they are typed, and they show on the board as well, so the contractor's van still parked inside at five o'clock is easy to spot and easy to connect to a name and a phone number.
The school gate register, on one screen
A paper register can tell you who came. It can't tell you who is still here. The gate board is built for exactly that question, and it is the first thing anyone sees when they open the module. The desk keeps it open from the first bell to the last, and the principal can keep it open in her own office. Every visitor on campus is listed in the order they arrived, the ones who have been inside longer than your school's limit stand out in red, and checking somebody out is a tap on their row, not a search through pages of handwriting.
The four figures at the top
The board opens with four figures. The first is the number of visitors on campus, with the number of entries they came in on written beneath it, because a family of four is four people and one entry. The second counts visitors who have stayed past your time limit, with the limit shown. The third is how many entries were checked in today. The fourth is how many people the gate turned away today, and it changes colour when it isn't zero. A principal who glances at the board at eleven in the morning knows the state of the gate without asking anyone, and a run of refusals is visible the same day, not at the end of the month.
Every visitor inside, and how long they have been in
Below the figures, every visitor on campus has a row: the name, the party size when more than one person came, the pass number, the purpose, whom they came to see, the time they came in and how long they have been inside, plus the badge and vehicle numbers when they were recorded. Rows are in order of arrival, so the person who has been in longest is always at the top. Anyone past the overstay limit gets a red border and an Overstaying tag. Times show in Indian Standard Time with ordinary digits on the English and the Hindi screens alike, so the desk can read an entry back over the phone without converting anything.
Check-out in one tap, and nothing closed on its own
Check-out is the action a gate repeats most, so it sits on every row of the board. One tap asks for a quick confirmation, "Check this visitor out?", and the time out is recorded the moment it is confirmed. The register then shows how long the visit lasted, worked out by Inkwelly rather than by somebody subtracting times at the end of the day. What the module will never do is check anyone out by itself. That is tempting, because a register full of people who never signed out looks untidy. But the question after an incident is often whether anybody was still on campus at nine at night, and that has to be answered by what happened at the gate, not by the software's guess.
- Check a visitor out with one tap and a confirmation
- Turn somebody away and record the reason from the same row
- See the pass number, purpose and host on every row
- Spot overstays by their red border and tag
- Open the printable register, if your role allows it
Paper visitor register vs Inkwelly Visitors & Gate
Refusals and overstays: the two entries paper registers miss
Ask to see the refusals in a school's visitor register and there usually aren't any. Guards turn people away every week: the man with no appointment asking for a teacher by her first name, the sales agent who wants five minutes with the principal, the delivery that turns up on a holiday with nobody to receive it. On paper those moments leave no trace, and an inspector or a police officer asking about them later gets a shrug. The second gap is the forgotten sign-out: the vendor who left by the side gate, the parent who went straight to the car park. Inkwelly records both, and never lets either disappear quietly.
Turned away, and written down
Anyone with check-in rights can turn a visitor away from that visitor's row on the board. Inkwelly asks why before it will save, in up to 500 characters, and suggests the kind of reason that helps later, such as "No appointment and the host is unavailable". The entry closes as turned away, leaves the list of people inside, and stays in the register with its reason printed under the status. The board counts today's refusals next to today's arrivals, and the register totals them for any dates you choose. Because the guard enters the visitor's details first, exactly as for anyone else, a refusal has a name, a phone number and a time, not just a line saying "sent back".
Overstays flagged, never auto-closed
Each school sets its own overstay limit, anywhere from 1 to 24 hours, and it starts at 4. A visitor still inside after that turns red on the board, with how long they have been on campus, and the overstay figure at the top goes up. That is all the software does. Nobody is signed out automatically, at the end of the day or at any other time, because a register that closes entries by itself can no longer say who was really on campus at nine at night. A person at the desk decides: the parent left by the side gate and forgot to sign out, or the contractor is genuinely still on the roof. Either way, the entry is closed by somebody who knows.
The movement register an inspection asks for
Every school eventually gets the question in writing: who visited on a particular date, when did they come, whom did they see and when did they leave? It might come from an inspection team, from the police after a complaint, or from the management after a parent's allegation. Child-safety expectations have hardened since the POCSO Act, 2012, and the NCPCR's Manual on Safety and Security of Children in Schools recommends controlled entry and a record of visitors. No software makes a school compliant on its own, and our POCSO compliance checklist for schools covers the wider duties. What a register gives you is the written record when somebody asks. With paper, the answer depends on whether the right book survived. Inkwelly's movement register answers it for any date range on one screen, in a form you can print, sign and file.
Any date range, every entry in order
The register opens on today, in Indian time, because most questions are about a date rather than a month. Pick a from date and a to date, and it shows every entry in order of arrival, including the whole of the last day you chose. Each row carries the pass number, the visitor's name with the party size and company, the phone number with the ID's last four digits masked beneath it, the purpose, whom they met, the time in, the time out, how long they stayed and the status. Refusals show their reason. Above the table sit the totals: entries, people, anyone still inside, refusals, and a count for each purpose, so how many parent meetings the school held this week is answered without a calculator.
Printed, signed and filed
The register is never split into pages on screen. A register with a next-page button isn't a register; it is what gets printed, signed and handed over, and it has to be whole. The Print button prints it without the portal's menus, buttons and date pickers, in plain black on white whatever colour theme the screen uses. Column headings repeat at the top of every printed page, and no entry is split across two pages. The date window is how you control the size: a day for an incident, a week for the management meeting, a month for the file an inspection team asks to see. Once the principal signs it, it goes into the office file like any other register.
One continuous book across academic years
Most things in a school roll over in April: classes, sections, fee structures. The gate register doesn't. It belongs to the school rather than to an academic session, because a question about 14 August has nothing to do with which session it fell in, and splitting one book into arbitrary volumes is exactly how old paper registers go missing. Whichever session you are working in on the portal, the gate register is the same continuous record, and a date range can run from March into April in one search. When the management asks for the gate record of last year's Diwali mela, nobody has to remember which cupboard that year's book went into.
Gate pass numbers that never repeat or skip
Every entry gets a gate pass number built from your school's prefix, the financial year and a running count, for example VIS/2026-27/00001. The prefix is yours to choose in gate policy: letters, digits and hyphens, up to 20 characters, shown in capitals. The count starts again on 1 April with the new financial year, going by the date in India rather than a server's clock. Numbers are issued at the moment an entry is saved, so a save that fails doesn't burn a number and leave a hole in a book you may be audited on, and two desks saving at the same second still get different numbers. The pass number is what the guard can write on a badge or quote in an incident report.
See your own gate on the board
Bring last month's visitor register to a demo. We'll check in a few of its entries, count a family as one entry, turn a visitor away with a reason, show how an overstay is flagged and print the register for a date, on screen, in front of you.
Why the register keeps only the last four digits of an ID
Walk past the gate of many Indian schools and you will see a register open on the desk with full Aadhaar numbers written into it, sometimes with photocopies of ID cards clipped between the pages. Nobody decided to build a collection of visitors' identity documents. It simply accumulated, one careful guard at a time, and it now sits in a cupboard where anybody can read it. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has made schools think harder about the personal data they hold, and a pile of ID copies at the gate is data no school needs.
Inkwelly takes the opposite position by design. The guard notes which ID the visitor showed and types only its last four digits: enough to match the card in somebody's hand today, and the same person's card next month, and of little use to anyone who copies the register. It is the same idea as the masked Aadhaar that UIDAI itself offers, which shows only the last four digits. The field holds four digits and nothing else, and the register never stores a scan or an image of the card.
What is stored, and what never is
For each visit Inkwelly keeps what a register needs: the visitor's name and phone number, the company or department if they gave one, the purpose, whom they came to see, how many people came in, the ID type and last four digits if your gate checks ID, any badge or vehicle number, a short note, the pass number, the time in, the time out and, for a refusal, the reason. It does not keep scans of ID cards or full ID numbers, and no photo of the visitor is taken at check-in. The personal data in the register is the smallest set that still lets the school answer who was here, when, and whom they came to see.
Who can read it
The board and the register show phone numbers, so they sit behind roles like the rest of the portal. The desk can see who is inside and check people in and out. Printing the register, which puts weeks of visitor names and phone numbers on paper, is a separate permission you give only to the people you choose, and changing gate policy is another. The ID digits appear masked in the register. Visitors never log in to anything and nothing in the module sits on a public link: the register is a school record, opened by signed-in school staff.
Built for the people who run the gate
A gate register passes through more hands than it seems to. The guard or the front-desk assistant writes it all day. The principal answers for it when something goes wrong. The owner or the management committee wants to know the gate is under control without ever reading it. Boarding schools add families visiting children who live on campus. In most schools all of them rely on the same fading notebook. In Inkwelly they work from the same record, each person sees only what their role allows, and nobody has to walk to the gate to ask how many people are inside.
For the guard and the front desk
The day becomes a short form and a list. A regular visitor is checked in by typing a phone number and confirming the purpose. A family is one entry. A delivery doesn't need a host. The board shows everyone inside in order of arrival, and check-out is one tap on their row. When somebody has to be sent back, the reason is written once, on the spot, and nobody has to remember it later. The screens work in English or Hindi, and the check-in form also works in a phone or tablet browser, sliding up from the bottom of the screen with the number pad ready for the phone number and the ID digits.
For the principal
Your gate becomes something you can check without leaving the office. The board tells you how many visitors are inside, whether anyone has overstayed and how many people were turned away today. When a parent calls about a stranger near the junior wing, the register for that afternoon shows who was on campus, whom they came to see and when they left. When an inspection team asks for the visitor register, you print the dates they want. You decide whether an ID check is compulsory, how long a visit can run before it is flagged and who in the office may print the register, and those decisions live in gate policy and staff roles rather than in a guard's memory.
For the owner and management
A management committee rarely reads a visitor register, but it answers for one. After any incident, the first questions are whether the gate was controlled and whether the school can prove it. Inkwelly gives you a written record for every day: every entry timed and tied to a purpose, nearly every visitor tied to the person they came to see, every refusal with its reason, and every overstay flagged rather than quietly closed. For a school group, each school keeps its own register, with its own pass numbers and its own gate policy, so a branch in Lucknow and a branch in Kanpur never mix their books.
For boarding schools
Families visiting boarders are checked in like any other visitor, under the hostel visit purpose, with the child's name in the "here to see" box. Boarders going out on leave are a different job, and on the Premium plan it belongs to the Hostel module: an outpass is approved, the child is released at the gate, and at that moment Inkwelly checks that the adult collecting them is still authorised by the parents. The gate register and the hostel gate sit side by side, one for the people coming in and the other for the children going out, and a boarding school needs both.
Inkwelly Visitors & Gate vs a standalone visitor app
Who can see and do what at the gate
The gate register uses the same roles and permissions as the rest of Inkwelly, managed in Identity & Access Management. It has five separate permissions: seeing the board, checking visitors in, checking them out, printing the register and changing gate policy. Anyone who can check visitors in can also turn them away. In every role Inkwelly sets up, checking in and checking out come together, because a desk that can let somebody in but can't sign them out is worse than useless. Printing the register and changing gate policy are kept apart: printing puts weeks of visitor names and phone numbers on paper, and gate policy decides how strict the gate is, so both stay with the principal or whoever you choose. Inkwelly's ready-made Front Desk role comes with the board, check-in and check-out, and nothing that prints the register or changes the policy. Your organisation's admin account can do everything.
The busiest days at the school gate
Most days a school gate sees a steady trickle: a few parents, a delivery or two, a technician. The register earns its keep on the other days. A PTM Saturday brings a family every minute. Admission season, from December to March in most schools, brings strangers asking for the office. The first weeks of April bring books, uniforms and furniture by the van-load. Board exam weeks bring observers to schools that are exam centres, and any week can bring a fire officer, a food safety inspector or somebody from the municipal corporation. The school's own buses aren't visitors at all: their routes, vehicles and drivers run in Transport. Inkwelly's gate register is built for the crowded days as much as for the quiet ones.
PTM Saturdays and annual day
On a parent-teacher meeting day most visitors are parents the school already knows, and many have been in before, so their phone numbers bring back their names and the queue moves at the speed of a phone number rather than a handwritten line. Each family goes in as one entry with the number of people, and the purpose is already set to parent meeting. On annual day or sports day, which sit on the school calendar in Events, guests can be checked in as event guests the same way, one family per entry. When the day ends, the board shows who hasn't signed out, and the desk closes each entry knowing whether that family has really left.
Admission season, deliveries and inspections
From December to March, families arrive to ask about admission. The gate records them under admission enquiry, with the office or the admission counsellor as whom they came to see, and the counsellor records the enquiry itself in Admissions & CRM, where it is followed up. In April, vendors deliver books, uniforms and furniture; deliveries need no host, so the guard notes the company and the vehicle number and moves on. Official inspections don't need a host either. The fire officer, the food safety inspector or a board observer is recorded with their department in the company box, and the register for that day shows exactly when they came and when they left.
What the gate register leaves to people
Some things the module deliberately doesn't do, and it is better to know them before a demo than after one. It sends no messages: the host isn't alerted when a visitor arrives and parents aren't messaged from the gate, so the desk still rings the staffroom as it does today. It doesn't photograph visitors, print gate pass slips or QR passes, or send visitors an OTP. It doesn't decide who may collect a day scholar early; that decision stays with the class teacher and the office, and the gate records the pickup. It doesn't connect to boom barriers, turnstiles or biometric gates. And your old paper registers stay in the office exactly as they are. What it does is keep an honest, complete, printable record of every person who came through the gate, which is the part most schools have never had.
Switching from a paper register or another ERP
Most schools reading this keep a visitor register already: a hardbound book at the gate, an Excel sheet at reception, or the visitor screen of another ERP. There is nothing to move before you start. Your old registers stay in the office as the record of past years, and the digital register begins on the day you go live. The register learns your regulars as they come back: the second time a parent or a vendor visits, their phone number brings back their details. Setting up the gate is a handful of decisions rather than data entry: the pass prefix, the overstay limit, whether ID is compulsory and who may print the register.
Go-live can be the next working day. If you are moving the rest of the school to Inkwelly as well, migration, training and setup cost ₹0, and extracting your data from your current system, or from Excel if the vendor won't cooperate, is on us, with older records moving across on their own track. We do a full day of on-site training at go-live and stay on WhatsApp through the first month, and if somebody on the desk is still struggling after that, we come back at no cost. The best way to judge the gate register is on your own busiest day, so book a demo and bring it with you.
“The number that matters in a fire drill isn't how many lines the guard wrote. It's how many people are inside.”
What's included with Visitors & Gate
- A gate board with visitors on campus, overstays, today's arrivals and today's refusals on one screen
- Check-in that starts with the phone number and fills in returning visitors from their last visit
- Eleven visit purposes, from parent meetings and admission enquiries to deliveries, inspections and hostel visits
- A required "here to see" for every purpose except deliveries, maintenance, official inspections and other
- One entry per visit with the number of people on it, and head counts rather than line counts
- The ID type and last four digits only, with a compulsory ID check your school can switch on
- Badge and vehicle numbers on each entry, shown beside the visitor on the board
- One-tap check-out with a confirmation, and no automatic sign-outs, ever
- An overstay limit from 1 to 24 hours, with overstaying visitors flagged in red
- Refusals recorded with a written reason and counted on the board and in the register
- Gate pass numbers with your own prefix, restarting each financial year, never repeated or skipped
- A printable movement register for any dates, across academic years, in English and Hindi
Know who is inside your gate, every day
Bring your visitor register and your busiest day of the week. In a live demo we'll check in your regulars, count a family as one entry, turn somebody away with a reason and print the register for that day.
Frequently asked
14 questionsWhich Inkwelly plan includes Visitors & Gate, and what does it cost?
Visitors & Gate is part of the Standard plan at ₹99 per student per year, and it is also included in Premium at ₹199 per student per year. It isn't part of Lite. Inkwelly's plans run from ₹49 to ₹199 per student per year, flat at any school size, with no enrolment slabs and no per-module upsell, and each plan includes everything in the plan below it. There is no separate charge per gate, per device or per visitor.
We keep a paper visitor register today. How hard is it to switch?
Not hard, because there is nothing to move. Your old registers stay in the office as the record of past years, and the digital register starts on the day you go live. Regular visitors fill themselves in from their second visit, when their phone number brings back their details. Go-live can be the next working day. If you are moving the rest of the school to Inkwelly as well, migration, training and setup cost ₹0, and extracting your data from your current system, or from Excel if the vendor won't cooperate, is on us. You can also start with a 90-day paid pilot on your real data; if it isn't working at day 90, you get a pro-rata refund and your data back in standard formats.
Who in the school can see the register, and who can change things?
Access follows roles. The gate register has five separate permissions: seeing the board, checking visitors in, checking them out, printing the register and changing gate policy. Anyone who can check visitors in can also turn them away. Inkwelly's ready-made Front Desk role can see the board and check people in and out, but can't print the register or change the policy, which stay with the principal or whoever you choose. In the roles Inkwelly sets up, checking in and checking out always come together, so the desk that lets somebody in can also sign them out.
Is there a mobile app for the guard at the gate?
Not yet. The gate register runs in the Inkwelly web portal, and there is no screen for it in the Inkwelly staff app today. The board and the check-in form do work in a phone or tablet browser: the form slides up from the bottom of the screen and the number pad opens for the phone number and the ID digits, so a guard with a smartphone can run the register from the gate itself. The printable register is easier to read on a bigger screen.
Can our guard and front desk use it in Hindi?
Yes. Every screen of the gate register, the board, the check-in form, the movement register and gate policy, is available in Hindi as well as English, including the visit purposes and the ID types. Times always show in Indian Standard Time with ordinary digits in both languages, so an entry can be read out over the phone without any confusion.
Do you store visitors' Aadhaar numbers or copies of their ID cards?
No. The guard records which ID the visitor showed, Aadhaar, driving licence, voter ID, PAN, passport, employee ID or other, and only its last four digits. The box accepts four digits and nothing else, and Inkwelly refuses anything longer. No scan or image of the card is ever stored, and no photo of the visitor is taken at check-in. It works like the masked Aadhaar that UIDAI offers: enough to match the card in front of the guard, and very little for anyone to misuse.
Will the teacher or the parent get a message when a visitor arrives?
Not today. The gate register doesn't send WhatsApp, SMS or app messages to staff or parents. Each entry records whom the visitor came to see, and the desk tells the host the way it does now, on the intercom or with a call to the staffroom.
What if a visitor leaves without signing out?
They stay on the board as still inside, and once they pass your overstay limit, which can be anywhere from 1 to 24 hours and starts at 4, their row turns red with the time they have been on campus. Inkwelly never checks anybody out by itself, because a register that closes entries on its own can't tell you who was really inside at nine at night. Somebody at the desk checks the visitor out once they know what happened.
Can the guard check who is allowed to collect a child early?
Not in this module for day scholars. When a parent or relative comes to collect a child during school hours, the gate records it under picking up a student, with the child's name and class in the "here to see" box, the time in and the time out. Whether that person may take the child is still decided by the class teacher and the office under your school's own rules. For boarders on the Premium plan, the Hostel module's gate release checks, at the moment of handover, that the adult is still authorised by the parents.
What happens when the guard turns somebody away?
The guard enters the visitor's details as usual, then turns them away from their row on the board and writes down why, in up to 500 characters. The entry closes as turned away, leaves the list of people inside and stays in the register with its reason. The board counts today's refusals, and the register totals them for any dates you choose, so the answer to whether you turned anyone away that week, and why, is on paper.
How does it count a family or a group that comes in together?
As one entry with the number of people on it, from 1 up to 200, the way a paper register is written. The board's headline figure is the number of visitors on campus, with the number of entries beneath it, and the register totals people as well as entries. A PTM morning with ten families of four shows forty visitors on campus, which is the number a principal needs if the fire alarm goes.
Can we print the visitor register for an inspection?
Yes, if your role includes printing the register. Choose the dates, from a single day to as long as you need, and the register shows every entry in order with the pass number, name, phone, the ID's last four digits masked, purpose, whom they met, time in, time out, how long they stayed and the status, with totals at the top. The Print button gives a black-and-white printout without the portal's menus and buttons, with the column headings repeated on every page. It is made to be printed; there is no Excel download of the register today.
What if the internet goes down at the gate?
The gate register needs a connection, like the rest of the Inkwelly web portal, and it doesn't work offline. Keep a paper slip at the desk for those minutes and enter the visitors when the connection returns, writing the actual arrival time in the note box, because an entry typed later is timed at the moment it is saved.
Can we pre-register visitors or give them a QR gate pass?
Not today. Every entry is made at the gate when the visitor arrives, and each one gets its own gate pass number, which the guard can write on a badge or a visitor card. There are no printed pass slips, QR codes or OTPs for visitors, and no kiosk where visitors check themselves in. An interview candidate or an inspection team expected on a given day is checked in the moment they reach the gate, and a returning visitor's phone number still fills in their details.
You might also like
7 readsSee Inkwelly on your school
30-minute demo. We open your current ERP with you and load your data into Inkwelly on the call. Dated go-live plan by the end of it.