The Incident Log You Do Not Keep

Something happens at the door. Security handles it. The night continues. By closing, three people remember it slightly differently and nobody wrote it down.

This is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when recording an incident costs more effort than the incident felt like it was worth — at the moment when everyone is busiest.

Four costs of not having the log

One — the licence review. Whenever your licence is examined, the authority has records. If you do not, their account of your venue is the only account. Not because they are hostile — because it is the only one that exists.

Two — the insurance claim. A claim months later rests on what was recorded at the time. A contemporaneous note is worth more than a confident recollection, and everyone in that process knows it.

Three — the staffing decision. Whether you need another person on the door on Fridays is answerable from an incident log and unanswerable from memory. Memory over-weights the dramatic and forgets the routine, which is exactly backwards for a staffing question.

Four — the pattern. This is the one that pays for the log. Incidents cluster: by hour, by door, by night, sometimes by staff member on duty. A cluster is actionable. An anecdote is not.

What "an incident" means

Set the bar low. The expensive mistake is a log that only contains serious events, because then it contains too few things to show a pattern.

Refused entry, and why
Ejection
Any physical contact between anyone
Medical, including someone unwell in a toilet
Property damage
Police attendance, for any reason
A complaint made to a staff member

The last one is the most under-recorded and the most predictive. Complaints precede incidents far more often than the reverse.

Five fields, and no more

The reason logs fail is that they ask for too much at the worst possible moment.

When       time, not just date
Where      door, floor, toilets, outside, VIP
What       one sentence, plain
Who acted  the staff member, by name
Outcome    refused, ejected, resolved, police, medical

Five fields, thirty seconds. Anything longer will be skipped on the nights it matters most, which are the busy ones.

No opinions and no diagnoses. "Guest appeared intoxicated and was refused entry" is a record. "Guest was drunk and aggressive" is a characterisation, and it will be read back to you.

Doing it in the moment

Decide who writes it. One role, not "whoever". Usually the senior door staff member. Ambiguity here is why logs go empty.

Write it before the shift ends, not the next day. Contemporaneous is the word that carries the weight, in both insurance and licensing.

Never leave a gap. A quiet night with nothing to report should be recorded as a quiet night with nothing to report. A log with missing dates is worth much less than a complete one — the absence reads as inconsistent record-keeping rather than as a peaceful evening.

⚠️ Do not edit an entry after the fact. Add a follow-up entry with its own timestamp. An amended record is worse than an incomplete one in every proceeding that will ever look at it.

Reading it monthly

Once a month, take fifteen minutes:

Incidents by hour          where does the night turn?
Incidents by location      one door or one area doing the work?
Incidents by weekday       is your Friday cover right?
Refusals vs ejections      a rising ratio means the door is catching more
Complaints                 what preceded the incidents

The refusals-to-ejections ratio is the most useful single number in the log. Refusals are cheap and happen outside. Ejections are expensive and happen inside. A door that refuses more and ejects less is working, and this is the only way to see that improve.

What the log is not

It is not a disciplinary tool. The moment staff believe entries are being counted against them, the log stops being accurate, and an inaccurate log is worse than none — it looks like a complete record and is not.

It is also not a substitute for training or for reporting obligations. It is the record that makes both of those defensible.

The system we built

tasteck is a booking and analytics system for night venues, built by people who ran them for sixteen years and grew from ¥200 million to ¥1.2 billion a year — six-fold, by attacking the business with systems rather than by pushing harder on sales.

What it does here, honestly: tasteck has no dedicated incident module. What it does hold is the surrounding context an incident log needs to be readable — who was on shift and when, which bookings were in the room, guest history, and takings by hour. A log without that context tells you an incident happened. With it, you can see how busy the room was, who was working, and whether the party involved had been in before.

What it does not do: it does not capture incidents, does not produce licensing reports, and does not hold CCTV or evidence. Keep the log itself in whatever form your licence and insurer expect — often a bound book, deliberately. This guide is not legal advice, and your local licensing requirements govern.

The output no one else produces

tasteck outputs the maximum you can spend on each marketing channel next month, as an amount in your currency.

The connection is not obvious and it is real. A channel that reliably delivers guests who generate incidents is expensive in a way no acquisition cost captures — in door labour, in licence risk, in the regulars who stop coming. The spend ceiling is computed from the lifetime value of the guests each source actually delivered, and a guest who cost you an ejection has a very different lifetime value from one who did not.

Nothing else in the nightlife category produces that figure.

Ask it from ChatGPT

tasteck connects to ChatGPT over MCP: ask your numbers as a question and the answer comes back in the chat — who was on shift at that hour, how full the room was, whether that party had visited before.

Multi-language is built in, the operating surface itself, with your language set during onboarding.

From $34 a month for up to two venues. Thirty days free on every plan, cancel any time. → Pricing

Start tonight

1. Put a book at the door. Paper is fine. Starting matters more than the format.
2. Five fields. When, where, what, who acted, outcome. Nothing else.
3. Name the person who writes it. One role, every shift.
4. Record quiet nights too. Gaps devalue the whole log.
5. Read it once a month. Hour, location, weekday, refusal-to-ejection ratio.

Read next

• Door Staff and the Queue Outside
• Cash Room Reconciliation and the Float
• The Report You Should Read Every Monday
• Night Venue Scheduling: Why the Roster Never Matches the Room
• Nightclub Software

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On benchmarks. No incident rates, acceptable ratios, or staffing thresholds appear in this guide. We do not have a dataset broad enough to publish them, and they vary enormously by city, capacity and licence regime. Three months of your own log, read by hour and by door, will show you a cluster no industry figure could.