Visit Reports Without The Empty Inbox Noise
A report that arrives every day saying nothing happened gets filtered within a week, and the filter catches the ones that mattered too. SmartLobby now lets you decide, for each cadence separately, whether an empty report is worth sending.
You can already receive a summary of who visited daily, weekly or monthly. Each cadence is independent — take the weekly digest and ignore the daily one if that suits how your site runs.
The setting that makes silence meaningful
Every cadence now has a second switch: email me even if there were no visits.
| Cadence | Empty report ON | Empty report OFF |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | An email every morning, even after a quiet day | Silence unless somebody visited |
| Weekly | One email a week, always | Only weeks with visitors |
| Monthly | One email a month, always | Only months with visitors |
Leave one on deliberately. An empty report is also proof that reporting still works. Silence, by
contrast, could mean a quiet week — or it could mean nothing is running and nobody noticed. That
distinction is worth one email.
Turn the rest off. A site that closes over the summer, or a location that takes occasional visitors,
does not need a daily "no visits" email. That is not information, it is something to delete.
The arrangement most sites land on
Switch off empty daily emails while keeping the empty weekly one. Quiet days produce nothing, so a daily
email always means somebody visited — and one message a week still confirms the pipeline is alive.
Configure all of this in Settings in the admin dashboard, under the daily, weekly and monthly report
options.
While we were in there
Reports used to skip runs. An issue where daily and weekly reports could miss alternate cycles has
been fixed. If your reports have been arriving irregularly and you assumed it was your mail server, it
probably was not — they should now arrive on every cadence you have enabled.
That fix is the reason the opt-out matters more than it sounds. A report that sometimes does not arrive
and a report that deliberately does not arrive look identical in an inbox. Once you can trust that an
enabled cadence always fires, absence becomes information rather than ambiguity.
What a report is actually for
The obvious use is curiosity — how busy were we last week. The uses that matter are less obvious, and they
are why the cadences differ.
A daily report is an accuracy check. Read the previous day's list and errors surface while they can
still be fixed: a visitor who never signed out and is still shown as in the building, a name typed into the
wrong field, a contractor logged against the wrong host. Left a month, those become permanent gaps in
records you may later need.
A weekly report is an operational one. Patterns show up over a week that a single day hides — the
morning your reception is always overwhelmed, the day deliveries cluster, whether a second kiosk would
earn its keep.
A monthly report is the one you forward. It is the number that goes to a landlord, a facilities review,
an insurer, or a security audit, and it arrives without anybody having to remember to produce it.
When you want the data, not the email
Reports are a convenience, not the only route to your visit history. If you would rather pull the data
yourself — into a spreadsheet, a BI tool, or your own retention process — the dashboard exports visit
history and people directly, and there is a REST API for anything scheduled.
Reports cover visits, and the counts follow the location and visitor-type settings on your account. So
a multi-site account gets numbers that reflect how you have actually organised your locations, not a flat
total that means nothing to anybody.
Ready for an inbox where a report arriving actually means something? Start your free 14-day trial →