Case Study: Donnington Doorstep - Access System

A tablet sign-in system and staff portal for an East Oxford community centre - replacing paper sheets and WhatsApp messages with a single, accurate attendance record that works for safeguarding, fire safety, and funder reporting.

Client: Donnington Doorstep - community family centre, East Oxford
Sector: Charity / Community
Project: Bespoke tablet sign-in system with staff admin portal, data exports, and configurable visit types

The Problem

Community centres run on trust, and that trust depends on knowing who is in the building. For Donnington Doorstep - which runs drop-ins, youth sessions, a community café, and more - that is not just good practice. It is a safeguarding obligation, a fire safety requirement, and increasingly a condition of the funding that keeps the centre operating.

The system in place was paper sign-in sheets, supplemented by ad hoc WhatsApp messages between staff. It worked well enough until it didn't: sheets got lost, records were incomplete when people were rushing through the door, and when a funder or trustee asked what attendance looked like over the past month, pulling a coherent answer together was a significant task in itself.

The problem was not simply that the system was manual. It was that the friction was baked in at both ends. At the door, anything that slowed visitors down or felt confusing meant sign-ins got skipped - and a record with gaps is often worse than no record at all. Behind the scenes, the staff who needed to see occupancy and export attendance history were working from the same imperfect raw material. What was needed was one honest, accurate record: visible in real time to staff, and exportable on demand.

The additional constraint was practical. Donnington Doorstep is a small charity. Enterprise visitor management platforms exist, but they are designed for corporate lobbies with IT budgets to match. What the centre needed was something that matched how they actually described their own work - in their own language, with their own visit categories - running reliably on hardware they already had.

The Approach

In Check Software built a two-part system on a single shared database: a public-facing tablet interface for sign-in and sign-out, and a password-protected staff portal for live occupancy, history, and settings. There is one source of truth for attendance - no duplicate spreadsheets, no reconciliation, no "which version is right?" moments after an incident.

The tablet interface was designed from the ground up for a mounted screen in a busy entrance. The flow is short: a visitor selects their visit type, enters their name, and sees a clear confirmation. Sign-out works the same way. The visit types - drop-in, youth club, staff, volunteer, and others - are controlled entirely by the centre, so the list on screen always matches how Donnington Doorstep describes its own programmes. Group reminders gently prompt visitors to register everyone arriving together, and idle timeouts return the screen to a clean start without trapping anyone mid-flow.

The staff portal sits behind Cloudflare Access, keeping it entirely separate from what visitors see. From there, staff get a live view of who is currently signed in, a full filterable history with pagination, and CSV export for reporting to funders and partners. Manual sign-in is available for edge cases when the tablet is not the right tool. Settings give the team control over visit type labels and order, email notification recipients, and optional automations - including a midnight auto sign-out for sessions that run late and daily email summaries - so the centre can adopt stricter record hygiene as it grows, without changing platform or learning a new system.

The system was deployed to the centre's existing hardware and domain, with no new equipment to procure or manage.

The Outcome

Donnington Doorstep now has a single, reliable attendance record that requires no manual effort to maintain and no detective work to report on.

"Now we know exactly who's in the building, and when a funder asks for attendance figures we can just export them."
- Manager, Donnington Doorstep

• Accurate records at the door - a short, clear sign-in flow that visitors actually complete, reducing gaps in the attendance log
• Live occupancy for staff - anyone on the team can see who is currently signed in, without asking around or checking a sheet
• Funder-ready exports on demand - CSV downloads available at any time, without manual data gathering or spreadsheet assembly
• Visit categories that match real programmes - configurable labels mean the system speaks the centre's own language, not a generic template
• One record, no duplicates - the tablet and the staff portal read from the same database; there is no second system to reconcile
• Runs on existing hardware and domain - no new equipment, no new subscriptions, and no retraining required

Donnington Doorstep is a community family centre based in East Oxford, running drop-ins, youth sessions, a community café, and a range of programmes for local families and residents.