Your Company's Visitor Dashboard
Last updated August 2026
Your building uses Porter to manage visitors, and the building team has given your company its own dashboard. You can see who is in your office, tell reception who you are expecting, pick up the parcels they are holding, and add your colleagues so they are notified when their visitors arrive.
You only ever see your own company. The other businesses in the building cannot see your visitors, and you cannot see theirs. The building's reception can see everyone, because they run the front desk and the fire register.
The first three minutes
When you first sign in, the dashboard offers you three things to do. None of them is compulsory and they disappear on their own once your first visitor arrives.
- Add the people visitors ask for. Go to People and add your colleagues. They appear on the screen in the lobby, and they get an email the moment their visitor arrives.
- Tell visitors how to find you. Under Settings, write your arrival instructions — “take the lift to the third floor and press the buzzer”. It is shown on the screen when they check in, and repeated in the email to whoever they are seeing.
- Expect your first visitor. You get a code to send them, and they walk straight in.
Today
Who is in your office right now, who is expected, and how many parcels reception is holding. It refreshes on its own, so leave it open if you want to see arrivals as they happen.
A visitor occasionally shows as Never signed out. That means the building closed their visit at the end of the day without anybody seeing them leave — usually they simply forgot to sign out. It is worth a word with them, because the fire register is only as good as the sign-outs.
Expecting someone
This is the one thing worth doing every time. Choose Expect someone, enter their name and when they are coming, and Porter gives you an eight-character code.
Send them the code. When they arrive they type it at the reception screen and they are checked in immediately — no queue, no explaining who they are here to see, and whoever they are visiting is notified straight away. The dashboard writes the message for you, so you can copy it into an email or a text.
If plans change, cancel them from the same screen. The code stops working.
Parcels
When a courier leaves something for your company, reception logs it and it appears under Deliveries. Once somebody has been down to collect it, press We have this — that is what tells reception the shelf is clear, and your name goes on the record so they know who to ask if it turns up again.
Your people
People is everyone at your company a visitor can ask for. Adding somebody puts them on the lobby screen and starts their arrival emails.
There is a switch on the form marked Let them use this dashboard. Leave it off for most colleagues — they do not need it to receive their own visitors. Turn it on for whoever covers for you, and they get an email inviting them to choose a password.
Removing somebody takes them off the lobby screen and stops their emails. Visits they hosted stay on the record, which the building is required to keep.
Settings worth changing
Two things matter and they are both at the top of the page: who reception calls when a visitor arrives with no named host, and what visitors are told when they check in.
Everything else is under More options and most companies never touch it. It is there if you need to come off the lobby directory, hide your staff names from the screen, or ask your visitors for something the rest of the building does not.
Who can see your visitors
Your company and the building operator are both responsible for your visitors' data, and you each see it for different reasons. You see your own visitors because they came to see you. The building's reception sees everyone because they run the front desk, and the fire roll-call crosses every company in the building — a fire does not respect a tenancy.
No other resident business can see your visitors, your parcels or your people. When somebody from the building team opens your company's record or exports its data, that is recorded.
Under Settings → More options you can download everything held for your company as a spreadsheet. That is what to send if one of your visitors asks what you hold about them.
Who has seen your records
Settings → Who has seen your records is your own log of the building team looking at your company's data. It names the person, says what they did, and gives the time: opening your company record, exporting your data, viewing your dashboard through the building's preview, and your own exports.
Read the note at the top of that page before you draw any conclusion from it. It says what the log does not cover, and it means it. Reception's routine view of who is on site refreshes every few seconds all day and is not recorded, because recording it would bury the four things that matter under millions of rows. The log is a record of somebody going into your records, not a record of every glance at the front desk.
When a visitor asks you to delete their details
They are allowed to ask either you or the building, and neither of you may send them to the other. Raise it under Settings → Privacy requests.
Your half runs immediately: the record of them coming to see you, what they wrote on the way in, your host's notes, the photo and the signature. The building's half is the register that a named person was inside the building between certain times, which belongs to the operator and which they may have a legal reason to keep. That half goes to the building team with one calendar month to answer, and their answer appears on your screen. If they refuse it, they have to say why, and that wording is what you read back to the visitor.
An access request works the same way and produces a file: that one person's records at your company, ready to hand over. Read the notes column before you send it. A note your host typed about the visit may mention somebody else, and a copy given to one person must not disclose another's details.
If you move out
Ask the building team for your leaving pack. It is one file with your people, your visitors, your parcels and the log of who has been in those records, and it is worth asking for before your last day rather than after: your dashboard stops working when the tenancy ends.
The pack also states what stays with the building afterwards and for how long. The building's own register of who was on the premises is theirs and is kept under their retention period, which does not reset because you left. If your company was given a shorter period than the building's, that stays in force too: it was a promise made to your visitors, not a term of your tenancy.
Things only the building can do
Ask the building team for any of these:
- Changing your company's name, or which floor you are recorded on.
- Checking a visitor in or out by hand at the desk.
- Anything to do with the fire register or an evacuation.
- Adding or removing your dashboard, and anything about what it costs.
- How long records are kept. The building sets the period, and it can set your company a shorter one than the rest of the building if you need it. It cannot be longer, because the period your visitors were told at the kiosk is the building's.
- Holding records back from deletion because of an incident or a claim. Ask the building team; it is a decision they take, not a setting you have.
If you sign in and see a page saying your company does not have a dashboard yet, nothing is wrong with your account — the building team has switched it off. Ask them, and the page becomes your dashboard the next time you open it.