Three businesses or a hundred.
One reception desk.
Porter runs a whole building from one kiosk. Every resident company sees its own visitors and nobody else's. Your reception sees all of them. When the alarm goes, the roll-call crosses every tenancy in the building, because a fire does not stop at a lease boundary.
One licence for the building, from £149 a month. Resident companies are never billed by us.
Why a normal visitor system does not fit
A building is not one big office
Visitor software is built for one organisation with one front desk. Put a second independent business behind that desk and three things break at once. Put in a dozen and they break every day.
Your directory is a laminated list
A visitor arrives for a firm on the third floor. Reception knows the company but not the person, the company changed its trading name in March, and the fastest route to the right desk is a phone call. Multiply by everyone who walks in before ten o'clock.
A tenant asks for its visitor records
You either send a spreadsheet with every other company's visitors on it, or you spend an afternoon cutting one. Both answers are wrong: the first is a disclosure, the second is not a system.
The alarm goes and the register is per-company
One company signed people in on an app, one on paper, one not at all. Nobody at the assembly point can say who is still inside the building, which is the one question the responsible person has to be able to answer.
How it works
One register for the building, one for each company
The two things a managed office needs are usually in tension: everyone counted in an emergency, and nobody able to read anybody else's book. Porter does both, in that order.
One kiosk, every company on it
The visitor types the company, not the person. The picker matches the registered name, the trading name, whatever the sign in the lobby says, and the floor. Companies that would rather not have their staff listed can take arrivals under the company name alone, and reception is notified instead. A visitor who is not sure who they are here to see gets a real answer rather than a dead end.
Reception sees the whole building
One live list across every resident company, with a company column and a filter, so the desk can answer "is anyone here for the second floor" without asking anyone. Parcels are logged against the company that owns them, and against a person only when there is one.
The roll-call crosses every tenancy
One register, one list, everybody who is inside the building: every resident company's visitors and your own staff on the same page. Nobody has to collate anything at the assembly point, and no company can be missing from it because it did not sign up to something.
A company sees its own records and nothing else
Isolation sits in the data layer, underneath every screen and every endpoint, rather than in a filter on a page somebody could forget to apply. A resident company asking for another company's visitor by its exact record id is answered with a not-found, because from where they are standing it does not exist.
Two states per company
Listed, or Connected
Every resident company is Listed, included in the licence, with no logins and nothing to learn. Turn one Connected when it wants its own view, one company at a time.
Listed
What almost every company in the building is.
- On the kiosk directory, under every name it trades as
- Its contact is notified the moment someone arrives for it
- Parcels logged against it, and signed for
- On the fire register, with everyone else
- Floor and arrival instructions shown to the visitor
No accounts, no training, no adoption problem. A company that never logs in still appears on the kiosk and still gets counted at the assembly point.
Connected
Everything Listed has, plus a dashboard of their own.
- Its own logins, by invite from you
- Today: who is here for them, right now
- Expected: pre-registered arrivals, added by them
- Deliveries: their parcels, and who collected
- People: their own hosts, managed by their own administrator
- A log of every time the building opened their records
- A route for a visitor's erasure or access request
You turn it on and off per company. Switching it off ends their access on the next request and leaves their records exactly where they were; switching it back on restores it.
The part you will be asked about
Two controllers, one kiosk
When a visitor signs in once and the record reaches both you and the company they came to see, you are joint controllers of that collection under UK GDPR, whether or not anyone has written it down. Porter is built around that fact rather than around it.
Two clocks, and the shorter one wins
You set the building's retention period. A company that has to keep less, usually a firm under a professional code, is given a shorter one, and the shorter figure is what actually runs. It can only ever shorten, because the period the visitor was told at the kiosk was yours, and a company holding the same record for longer would make that notice untrue.
Records can be held when they need to be
An incident, a claim, an investigation. Put a window and a reason on it and the retention sweep stops crossing it, for one company or the whole building, until you lift it. Lifting keeps the record of the hold, because "we held these from March to September" is the point.
Every company can see who opened its records
A resident company gets its own log: which named member of your team opened its records, exported them, or looked at its dashboard, and when. The page says out loud what it does not cover and why, because a log that looks complete and is not is worse than no log at all.
A visitor can write to either of you
They are entitled to, and neither of you may pass them along. A deletion or access request raised with a resident company does that company's half on the spot and lands on your compliance screen with a calendar month to answer; one raised with you already covers theirs, and tells them it happened.
A company that leaves takes its records with it
One file: their people, their visitors, their parcels, and the log of who has been in those records, which is the half they cannot reproduce once their logins stop. It also states, in words, what stays with you afterwards and under which period, which is the question a departing office manager always asks.
How Porter itself handles the data is on the trust page and in the data processing agreement, which is between Porter and you as the operator. A resident company's relationship is with you, not with us, and the arrangement between the two of you is a document we help you put in place rather than one we are party to.
Pricing
One licence for the building
Priced on how many companies are resident, not on how many visitors walk through the door. Resident companies are never billed by us, and never see a Porter invoice.
Up to 20 companies
A single floor, or a small building with room to grow.
per building, per month
21-50 companies
The size most managed offices actually are.
per building, per month
51-100 companies
A large building, or one operator running a whole site.
per building, per month
100+ companies
Multiple buildings, or a portfolio. We will quote it.
per building, per month
Bands are counted on listed companies. You move up a band after thirty days above it, and down only at renewal, so a month of churn does not change your invoice twice.
Connected company
Gives one resident company its own logins and its own dashboard, scoped to its own visitors. You turn it on per company and the dialog tells you the monthly difference before you confirm. £12 on annual.
White-glove setup
We take your tenancy schedule, load every company, floor and contact, and hand the building over configured. Optional: the importer is in the product and you can run it yourself.
Portfolio
Single sign-on, SCIM directory provisioning, the REST API and webhooks, and reporting that crosses your buildings. For an operator running more than one site.
Annual billing
2 months free on the building licence. Connected companies move to their own lower annual rate of £12 rather than being discounted twice, and the Portfolio add-on is charged for twelve months.
In the licence, at every band
- Unlimited visitors, hosts and kiosks
- Every resident company on the directory and the fire register
- Deliveries, contractors and inductions
- The data-protection apparatus below
A building is set up with you rather than sold self-service, so there is no card form at the end of this page.
Talk to us about your buildingTell us about your building
How many companies, how many entrances, and what happens today when the alarm goes. That is usually the whole first conversation.
Single-occupier office instead? Porter's standard plans start lower.