🚪 A Tenant Tag for Every Door, So You Know Whose Heat Is Out

The first version of tenant requests gave a building one code. It worked. Within a week on a real property the limitation was obvious: a request would arrive saying the heat was out, and the first thing anybody had to do was call around to find out whose heat.

A forty-door building with one code is a suggestion box. A maintenance team needs the door number, and asking the resident to type it does not work. They get it wrong, they leave it blank, or they put the building number in the unit box. A job for 4B arrives labeled 12C and somebody drives across town twice.

So the tag now belongs to the unit rather than the building, and everything the request needs to be actionable is attached to the tag rather than asked for on the form.

A building now records three different people

Before any of this works, the app has to keep three different people straight. They get mixed up all the time, and mixing up the wrong two is what puts a tenant's phone number on a web page anybody can open.

The site contact is who a vendor calls. That is the one that can appear on a public check-in page, because it is a business line and the whole point of publishing it is that a contractor standing at a locked door can reach somebody.

The building owner is the person or company that owns the property. That is a commercial relationship and it is never published anywhere.

The tenant is whoever is in a particular unit right now. That is somebody's home address and phone number, and it is the one that must never leave your account. So the tenant page publishes a unit LABEL and never a tenant name.

• ▸ Owner — recorded per building, never published, changed only by an account owner or manager.
• ▸ Site contact — recorded per building, may appear on a vendor check-in page, and can be switched off per building.
• ▸ Tenant — recorded per unit, never published, read privately when a request arrives so the office knows who to call back.

Every unit, including the empty ones

Units, tenants & rent lists every unit at a property. A unit is whatever the door says — 4B, Suite 200, North Wing, Unit 12 — and it exists whether or not there is any equipment in it. A vacant suite says "vacant, nothing installed" instead of quietly vanishing, because a vacancy is a fact you want on the list when you are planning a turnover.

A unit carries the tenant's name, phone, email and free-text notes: access instructions, the alarm code, who to call first. Only an account owner or manager can write the tenant fields. That is the same rule the app already applies to the site contact: who is in a property is a customer relationship, not a job detail.

Renaming a unit does the thing you would expect and the thing you would not. Rename 4B to 402 and every piece of equipment labeled 4B follows it. Work orders do not: a job that was done in 4B stays recorded as 4B, because an invoice has to keep matching the paperwork it was raised against.

What the resident sees

They point a camera at the tag and a page opens. No app, no account, no password, and the page says so: it will never ask you to pay or sign in, so a spoofed sticker has something to contradict.

An emergency number sits above the form as a tap-to-call button, because somebody reading it may be walking down a staircase.

Then a short set of questions. If the answer to any of them is yes — a gas smell, in particular — the form is removed and replaced by that phone number. This is deliberate, and it is the one thing on the page you cannot turn off. Every gas utility gives the same instruction: leave, and do not use a phone, a light switch or any electrical device indoors. Filling in a web form indoors is the dangerous act, so the page refuses to take one rather than accepting it and marking it urgent.

If nothing is tripped, they describe what is wrong and can attach up to three photos. They are not asked for a unit — it came from the tag. They are not asked for a phone number or an email — those are read from the unit's own record when the request arrives. Their name is optional, because a roommate or a guest cannot honestly answer it.

The page behind the tag, written once and then adjusted

Under the form is whatever the property manager chose to publish: office name, phone, email and hours; an after-hours number; what counts as an emergency; shutoff locations; fire safety; utilities; trash, parking and quiet hours; current notices; and links to documents.

That is written once for the building, and every unit shows it. Then a unit changes only the parts that are different, because the shutoffs are behind the pantry in one apartment and in the hall closet in another, and the ground-floor suite puts its trash out in the side alley. A unit stores only its difference, so changing the office number changes it everywhere rather than in forty places.

A button on the unit copies the building's text in so it can be edited rather than retyped. It only fills the blanks, so hitting it twice never overwrites something you already wrote for that unit.

Two of the fields are dumb on purpose. Fire safety is free text only: nothing generates it, templates it or suggests a default. Stay-put versus evacuate depends on how the building is constructed, and in some cities an official notice is already required on that door. And the document links carry a warning at the point you paste one: there is no sign-in, so anyone who scans the tag can open it, and a lease does not belong there.

From a scan to a job

Requests arrive in their own tab and stay there. They never become a work order on their own. A report from a resident is a claim that something is wrong, not an instruction to dispatch.

When you do turn one into work, it asks you to pick somebody on your team, the same as any other work order, and the unit travels with it. Photos stay private throughout: only you and your active team can open them, after signing in. They are never public, and never attached to the notification email.

Alerts go to a notify list kept deliberately separate from your vendor check-in contacts, because a contractor should not be told what is broken inside somebody's home. That list takes emails and text numbers, and each number shows whether it has registered SMS consent. Carriers block the message otherwise. A number that has not registered is accepted and then silently never texted, and a silent failure is worse than a visible one.

Printing them

A tag prints as a letter-size door tag, or on 4 × 6, 4 × 2 or 2 × 2 label stock, with the unit already printed on it in large type. Nobody has to figure out which unit it goes on, including whoever hangs it.

Choosing a label size sets the page size, so a label printer is told 4 × 6 rather than handed a letter sheet with a small drawing in the corner. Both the phone and the web dashboard print the same thing from the same generator.

If a card goes missing, replace it. Replacing mints a new code and retires the old one immediately, so the card in somebody's trash stops working.

Finding one unit again

A building's equipment list filters by unit, on the phone and on the dashboard, including a "No unit" option for the machines nobody has labeled yet. Start with that filter, because it is the list of work to do before any of this is useful.

Work orders carry the unit they were done in, so "what has been done in 4B" is a question with an answer.

Does the tenant need the app or an account?

No. They point a phone camera at the tag and a web page opens. There is no app to install, no account to create and no password. The page states that it will never ask you to pay or sign in, so a fake sticker has something to contradict.

How does the request know which unit it came from?

The unit is encoded in the tag itself, which is minted for one unit. The resident never sees a unit field, so the request cannot carry a unit that disagrees with the door it was scanned on.

Is the tenant's name or phone number published on the page?

No. The tag publishes the building name and the unit label and nothing else about who lives there. The callback contact is read from the unit's private record when a request arrives, so it never travels through the public page.

What happens if a printed tag goes missing?

Replace it on that unit. Replacing mints a new code and retires the old one right away, so the card in somebody's trash stops working.

Can two units say different things on their page?

Yes. The building page is the base every unit shows, and a unit overrides only the parts that differ — a shutoff location, a trash day, a parking rule. Text fields replace the building's version. Lists like house rules and documents add to the building's lists rather than replacing them.

Does a tenant request create a work order automatically?

No. Requests land in a Tenant Requests tab for review and never become work on their own. Turning one into a work order is a deliberate step, and it asks who to assign it to from your team.

What happens if someone reports a gas smell?

The form is removed and replaced with a phone number and the instruction to leave first and call from outside. Filling in a form indoors is the dangerous act, so the page refuses to take one rather than accepting it and marking it urgent.

Does this work on the web dashboard as well as the app?

Yes. Units, owners, tenant pages, per-unit overrides and tag printing all work the same on the phone and on the web dashboard.

Jonathan Curtis

HVAC Technician & Founder · Equipment Tracker Pro

Jonathan Curtis is an HVAC technician and the founder of Equipment Tracker Pro. He built the app to solve real problems he encountered in the field, including the daily frustration of faded nameplates and administrative double-entry.