📣 A Door Tag Your Tenant Can Use Without an Account

The worst version of a maintenance request is a voicemail that says "the air conditioning is broken" and gives no unit number. The second worst is a text message with a photograph of a thermostat, which tells you the room is warm and nothing else.

What actually makes a request useful is boring: which unit, what is wrong, since when, and a picture of the thing rather than the symptom. The obstacle has never been that tenants are unwilling to provide it. It is that every system for collecting it asks them to install an app or create an account to report a broken fridge once every three years.

What the Tenant Sees

A printed tag, headed "Need something fixed?", with the building name under it and a large code in the middle. Under the code the web address is printed in full, because a camera that will not focus is a real thing and somebody should still be able to type it. Three steps across the bottom: point your camera at the code, describe the problem and add photos if it helps, send it.

Scanning opens a plain form. Unit or apartment, optional. Their name, optional. Then "What's wrong?", with the prompt asking where it is, what it is doing and how long it has been happening. Then up to three photos, also optional. Under the photo picker it says that photos are visible only to the people who maintain the building, because a tenant is being asked to photograph the inside of their home and deserves to be told who will see it.

When they send it they get a confirmation naming the building, and a line that says somebody will review it and that this does not schedule a visit on its own. If you have filled in a site contact, their name and number are shown for anything urgent. That honesty is deliberate. A form that implies a technician is now on the way creates a worse problem than the one it solved.

Where It Lands

Requests arrive in a TENANT REQUESTS tab in the Dispatch Center, with a count on it. They sit there for review. A tenant request never turns itself into a work order, never schedules anything and never touches an equipment record on its own, which is the entire reason it is safe to put a code on a public door.

You can also nominate who gets told. The building's Site Info panel has a TENANT SERVICE REQUESTS notify list, kept separate from the vendor check-in lists so the person who fields resident complaints is not also getting every contractor sign-in. The alert links through to Dispatch rather than carrying the photographs, so a notification landing on somebody's phone never exposes the inside of an apartment.

The Limits, and Why They Exist

A code on a door is an open endpoint. Anyone who can see it can use it, including anyone who photographs it and walks away. So it has limits, and they are enforced in the security rules rather than only in the page, which matters because a page is not the only way to reach a form.

One request per hour per tag. Three photos per request. Photos readable only by the account owner and their active team members.

The fourth limit is the one I want to be honest about, because it is a limit on the cleanup rather than on the tenant. Photos have to upload before the request document is written, since their paths are part of that document. If the write is then refused, the page tries to take the photos back off the server, and for a signed-out tenant that attempt genuinely fails: the storage rules only let the account owner or an active team member delete under tenant requests, which is the same rule that keeps those photos private in the first place. So the page does not claim a removal that did not happen. It counts them and says so, and it tells the tenant that the photos stay visible only to the people who maintain the building. Nobody else can read them, but they are on the server, and being told that is better than being told a comfortable version of it.

Be aware of what "per tag" means. The tag carries the building's code, not an apartment's, which is why the form asks the tenant which unit they are in. In a large residential building an hourly limit is shared across everyone using that tag, so it suits a mechanical room, a laundry room, a management office door or a small property better than it suits forty apartment doors on one code today.

The Same Problem on Equipment Tags

The door tag came out of a defect on a completely different surface. Scanning a unit's own QR tag used to offer one action: log completed service. So anybody who scanned a tag to report a problem had to file it through a form that asked for a before photo, an after photo, which parts they had replaced and how much refrigerant they had added.

The result was that "the walk-in is warm" arrived in the inbox as a completed repair. Not a mislabeled record, an actively misleading one, because the history then showed work that had never been done.

Unit tags now offer Request Service next to Log Completed Service. The request form asks what is wrong and how urgent it is, on a scale of down, urgent, soon or routine, with one photo picker labeled "Photo of the issue" and a button that says Send Request. Both the phone inbox and the web Dispatch page label every entry SERVICE REQUESTED or COMPLETED WORK. A guest submission that gets refused now says that submissions are not active for that building and to contact the building manager, instead of "Failed to submit. Please try again", which used to send a technician standing at a rooftop unit into a retry loop that could never succeed.

How to Print One

On the phone, open the building, go to its Site Info panel, and tap PRINT TENANT REQUEST TAG. If the building does not have a code yet, one is created. It prints on Letter portrait, so any office printer will do, and the tag is deliberately plainer than the vendor door sign: the reader is a resident with a problem, not a contractor following a process.

It is a Pro feature. The hosted page behind it and the private photo storage are what makes it one.

Put it where somebody who has a problem will actually be looking. Inside an apartment door, in the laundry room, in the mailroom, on the inside of the mechanical closet. The tag itself carries the line that people should call the number they normally use for emergencies, because a form that a human reads in the morning is not an emergency channel and should not pretend to be.

What This Is For

It is not a work order system and it is not a helpdesk. It is a way of turning a phone call you were going to get anyway into a written record with a unit number and a photograph attached to it, before anybody drives anywhere.

That matters most on the calls that would otherwise become a diagnostic trip. A photograph of the actual appliance, with a model number visible in it, is frequently enough to know which part to put on the truck. The argument for dispatching prepared rather than dispatching to look is here.

Does a tenant need an app or an account to send a request?

No. They scan the tag with their phone camera, which opens a web page, fill in the form and send it. No install, no sign-in, and no account is created for them.

Does a tenant request create a work order automatically?

No, and deliberately. Requests land in a TENANT REQUESTS tab in the Dispatch Center for review. Nothing is scheduled and no equipment record is changed until you act on it.

Who can see the photos a tenant attaches?

Only the account owner and the active members of their team. That is enforced in the storage rules, not just in the page, and the notification email links through to Dispatch rather than carrying the images.

How many requests can be sent from one tag?

One per hour per tag. The tag carries the building's code, so that limit is shared by everyone using that particular tag, which is why the form asks the tenant to say which unit they are in.

How many photos can a tenant attach?

Up to three. If they pick more, the first three are kept and the page tells them so.

Is the tenant request tag a Pro feature?

Yes. It uses a hosted page and private photo storage, both of which sit under Pro. Vendor check-in tags and equipment tags are separate codes with their own jobs.

Can somebody report a problem by scanning a unit's equipment tag instead?

Yes. A unit's public page offers Request Service alongside Log Completed Service. The request form asks what is wrong and how urgent it is, and the entry is labeled SERVICE REQUESTED so it is never mistaken for work that has already been carried out.

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-world property handoff challenges, including the absolute nightmare of losing years of maintenance histories and having to reprint physical asset tags.