2023: A year in review

t’s that time of the year again! It only feels like yesterday we were wrapping up 2022 - a year that was full of growth and milestones and this year is no different. In last year’s annual round-up we said that 2022 was the start of an exciting journey and in 2023 it’s been great to really start sharing that journey and bringing our community along, new and old.

2023 has seen us hit more milestones (quarter of a billion sign ins is approaching!), we’ve been at multiple events across different industries and hosted our first customer summit. It’s been a year of exciting developments and we’re looking forward to entering 2024 bringing you some of the best enhancements and add-ons to date. But before we sign out of another year, here’s 2023’s year in review…

We’ve reached a total of over 215 million sign ins
with a record of over 510,000 sign ins a day
on over 18,000 connected iPads
and over 135,000 connected active companion app users
booking over 3 million spaces
in over 16,000 sites across the globe
with an additional 3,000+ remote sites.

Quarter One

At the beginning of the year, we introduced our brand new add-on solutions, Sign In Central Record and Sign In Scheduling. Sign In Scheduling enables you to start the visitor experience from the moment they book an appointment, offering a seamless appointment booking experience for customers and pre-registering them as visitors, reducing admin time and minimising no-shows. For the schools in our community, Sign In Central Record is the secure, compliant and simple solution for maintaining a Single Central Record, also enabling you to deny entry if the relevant checks and documents aren’t stored in your SCR.

In March we returned to The Bett Show. Bett is always one of our favourite events every year and it was great to showcase our new add-on solutions this year. Bett 2024 - see you there!

In Q1 we added various enhancements to our Wonde sync for school MIS integration. These included custom attendance codes for writebacks which enables you to collect multiple attendance codes - a great addition if you want to collect and store extra information around why a student has left early. We also added support for filters for registration and house.

We also made all features available on our Web Companion app - adding all the functionality of our mobile apps such as evacuations, desk booking, pre-registrations and more.

Quarter Two

In Q2, we introduced Sign In App Identity Match which can be used to verify the identity of repeat visitors signing in. Once enabled, Identity Match works alongside the ‘chance of a photo’ group setting to compare photos taken during sign in with the group member’s profile photo. If a discrepancy is detected, their sign in record is flagged in the portal.

We also added group member retention, allowing you to maintain your group by archiving or deleting members who have been inactive for a specified period of time. Archiving members will prevent them from signing in and make them invisible to others; deleting members will remove them from the group but won't delete their visit history.

In the second quarter of the year, we also exhibited at two more exhibitions, The Health + Care Show and The Facilities Show where we shared the full suite of Sign In Solutions brands.

At the end of June, some of our UK team got muddy for a great cause as they took on The Wolf Run, a 10km muddy obstacle course, to raise money for local food banks.

Quarter Three

The beginning of quarter three also saw us enhance our translations features for a truly end-to-end multilingual sign in experience for all. Custom translations enable you to not only greet your visitors in their native language but also offer the full sign in process in their chosen language too - adding translations for custom fields, group names, welcome messages and policies & messages.

If you’ve got an eagle eye, you might have noticed some subtle UI updates throughout 2023. In Q3, these included a refresh to our manage screen on the portal. These updates are all improving usability and getting us prepared for some exciting new features coming soon.

We also released v3 of iOS Companion as an open beta. Companion iOS V3 has been rebuilt from the ground up to leverage the same technology we use for our Android and web apps. While the core functionality is the same, it does introduce a dark mode option and makes some changes behind the scenes to auto sign in. The end of 2023 has seen us begin rolling this out live to all iOS Companion users.

An exciting update at the end of Q3 for our education community was the addition of Arbor writeback. Arbor writeback enables you to writeback late marks.

Slack host notifications were also introduced in quarter three. Our Slack integration has enabled notifications to be sent into channels for a while, but with host notifications, when the “Send to Slack” notification is enabled, a direct message will be sent straight to the user via Slack.

Quarter Four

In the final quarter of the year, we added improved bulk edit tools. Our new and improved bulk edit tools make it simple to manage repeat visitors. The improvements allow you to easily filter and view repeat visitors within a group, enabling you to review and edit current settings across a large number of individuals such as employees - filtering by department or other criteria.

We also made our referrals scheme live for all customers. If you’re enjoying your experience with Sign In App, you can share your personal Sign In App referral link with your network and can earn points towards swag, charity donations and discounts. Head to the Manage section of your portal to get your link and start sharing.

Q4 was a quarter full of events with us exhibiting at The Care Show for the first time and returning for The Schools & Academies Show - both exhibitions were great to share more about the future of visitor management with our add-on solutions.

In November, we held our first ever customer event, Sign In Summit UK. Thank you to everyone that attended - it was great to share some teasers into our upcoming roadmap and get feedback on what you’d like to see from our solutions in the future.

To end the year, our beta program started for one of our most highly requested features, Time & Attendance. Our time & attendance features will help you to ensure timesheets are accurate, without sacrificing safety, allowing repeat visitors or employees to record time spent on activities while signed in e.g. on a break, on lunch or working on a specific project.

That wraps up our 2023 year in review. Thank you to everyone in our Sign In App community for being on this journey with us, our solutions wouldn’t be where they are today without you. However you’re choosing to see in the new year, we hope you have a safe, happy and healthy one. See you in 2024!