Buildings with more than one company in them

Who this is for

A building let to more than one company, with one reception desk between them. A managing agent, a landlord, a serviced office.

It is entirely optional. A building that never adds a company behaves exactly as it does today — no extra dropdown at reception, no headings in the evacuation email, nothing to learn. If you have one company in your building, skip this article.

One Mirra account is one building. If you manage two buildings, they are two accounts — the site name, the screens, the reception desk and the fire wardens are all different, and sharing them between buildings would make every one of those settings ambiguous.

Setting it up

In Settings, under Companies in the building, add each occupier with its name and floor or suite. The floor is worth filling in: it goes on the evacuation email, where "Kestrel Legal, fourth floor" is what somebody can act on and a company name on its own is not.

Then — and this is the step that actually makes it work — go to your list of sign-ins and put each person with the company they work for. Anybody left as building staff belongs to the building itself: you, the desk, the maintenance team.

Nobody is asked which company they are visiting

A visitor picks who they are here to see. They are never asked which company that person works for, and this is deliberate.

Somebody arriving for a ten o’clock meeting knows the name of the person they are meeting. They often do not know which of your eleven companies that person works for, and asking them to pick from a list is asking a stranger to know your building better than you have told them. So the person carries the company, and the visit takes it from them.

The consequence is the one thing that quietly breaks this: a company with nobody assigned to it will never have a single visitor counted under it. The settings page says so on the row, in orange, until you fix it.

If a company shows "nobody is assigned to this company yet", every visitor for them will be counted under nobody in particular — including on the evacuation list. It is not an error and nothing will fail; the list will simply look emptier than the building is.

What reception sees

The desk works the same way it always did, with two additions.

The list of who is in the building says which company each visitor is here for, and there is a dropdown to show one company at a time — for answering "how many has Kestrel got in?" on the phone. When a filter is on, the count reads "3 visitors of 11", so a filtered list is never mistaken for the whole building.

The list of people a visitor can be here to see shows the company beside each name. Two people called Sarah in a building of eleven companies is not a hypothetical, and a first name alone cannot tell them apart — at the desk or at a self-service screen.

The evacuation list, which is the point

This is why the feature exists.

When an emergency broadcast starts, the roll call goes out grouped by company, each heading carrying the floor and a count, in alphabetical order, with anybody not attached to a company listed last.

At a muster point the marshals are not one queue. Each company counts its own people, and a flat list of thirty names forces every marshal to read all thirty while standing in a car park. "Kestrel Legal, fourth floor — 3" is something a person can act on.

Everything the list said before, it still says: it covers signed-in visitors only and not staff, it is a snapshot with a time on it, and it names any permit to work nobody has signed off.

• Grouped by company, alphabetically, with a count and floor per heading
• Visitors not attached to a company come last, under their own heading
• A building with one company keeps the plain list — grouping one heading over everybody helps nobody
• The headline count is unchanged: grouping rearranges the list, it never filters it

When a company leaves

Mark the tenancy ended. They come off the pickers and the filters, and their people go back to being unattached.

Every visit that ever belonged to them stays on the record and stays attached to them. That is the whole reason ending and removing are different buttons: an incident investigation two years from now is entitled to know which company a visitor was there to see, and the company having moved out since does not change the answer.

Removing outright is for a row you created five minutes ago with a typo in it. Mirra refuses it the moment a single visit points at the company, and tells you to end the tenancy instead.

Ended companies stay under Past occupiers, and can be brought back if a tenancy renews or you ended the wrong one.

Giving a company its own sign-in

A company can have its own login that sees only their own visitors.

Under Team, create a sign-in and choose the access level "One company only". It will ask which company, and will not let you save without one — an account whose whole definition is one company, pointing at none, is the one thing that must never exist here.

What they get is their own reception desk. The page is headed with their company name, and every list on it is theirs alone.

They can see

Their own visitors who are in the building now, their own expected arrivals and codes, and their own people in the "here to see" list. Nothing about any other company, and no count that would reveal one.

They can do

Sign their own visitors in and out, print their badges, and invite people for another day. If they sign somebody in without naming a host, that visitor still counts as theirs.

They cannot see

Permits to work, contractor insurance and method statements, the blocked list, the reception settings, the list of companies, your screens, your billing, or anything at all belonging to another company. They are also never told whether a name has been to the building before, or that anybody is blocked — typed one name at a time, either answer would be a way to read your building back out.

They cannot do

Sign out somebody else's visitor, invite against somebody else's host, or override a check. Where the building's own rules stop a sign-in, they are told to send the visitor to the front desk — and not told why, because the reason is your judgement about somebody, not theirs.

You keep everything. An owner still sees the whole building, grouped by company, exactly as before.

What they get when the alarm sounds

Each company's own sign-ins receive their own roll call: their people, their names, and nothing else. You receive the whole building, grouped by company, as you do now.

That is the point of it. At a muster point the marshals are not one queue — each company counts its own people, and a marshal reading thirty names to find three is a marshal counting slowly.

Every company's copy says plainly, at the top, that it is NOT the building's list and that you hold the full one. A marshal must never be able to mistake a partial list for the whole building.

Each company has its own fire-warden list, alongside your own. Add addresses when you set the company up, or later by editing it — and they can add to it themselves from their sign-in, which is usually better, because you do not know who their fire marshal is and they do. A company with no Mirra sign-in at all can still receive its roll call this way, which is most tenants of most buildings.

Nobody is sent both your list and a tenant's. If you have put a tenant's office manager on your own warden list, she gets your wider list and not the narrower one — unless yours fails to reach her, in which case her company's copy is sent after all rather than leaving her with nothing. Between two tenants there is no such tidying: somebody who marshals for two companies in your building receives both copies, because they are responsible for two sets of people and one list would leave a set out.

Permits to work are not on a company's copy. A permit is yours — you authorised the work, you set the conditions, and you carry the duty to close it off. Your own copy still names every open and lapsed one, which is what a fire service asks for on arrival.

When somebody leaves or moves

Ending a tenancy stops their sign-ins working, and says so when they try — they are told their company is no longer listed in the building, which is the truth and points them at you.

A company that still has its own sign-ins cannot be removed outright. Mirra will ask you to remove those people first, or to end the tenancy instead, so that nobody is left with an account that fails for a reason nothing on screen explains.

Moving one of your people between companies applies from that moment on: a visitor signed in afterwards is counted under the new company. An invitation already sent is not moved: it carries the company it was created with, and that is the company the visitor arrives under on the day. The one exception is an older invitation that never recorded a company at all — those take one from the host when the visitor arrives, so they land wherever that person is by then. If somebody has moved and people are already booked in to see them, send those invitations again.

Three things worth knowing. Badge numbers count up across the whole building each day, so a company can tell roughly how busy the building has been — they have to be unique at one desk, and two visitors holding number 3 is worse. A visitor's employer and phone number are held once for the building rather than once per company, because that is what makes "does this contractor hold current insurance" answerable at all; a company signing in a name it already knows will see those details, and cannot change them. And a sign-in your rules stop looks different from one that goes through, so a company typing a full name can tell the building has some issue with somebody by that name — never what it is. Closing that last one entirely means every tenant's sign-in going through your desk, which is the thing this feature exists to stop. If any of it matters in your building, tell us.