Site Access Authorization

This record sits at the gate, after the knowledge and competence records and before any task authorisation. It decides entry, and only entry; teaching, task control and removal-for-cause each live in a neighbouring template.

Regulation reaches contractor access from two directions: safety regimes require the host to control who works under its roof and on what conditions, and food defense regimes require the site to control who can reach product at all. The authorisation record is where both duties become a named decision.

No jurisdiction publishes a contractor badge standard. The duty assembles itself from host liability for who is on site, process safety rules about who may enter covered areas, food defense rules about who may reach product, and employment law about who may work at all.

The form will accept a year-long, site-wide, twenty-four-hour grant issued against an expired induction, and score it badly. The judgement calls are the ones that keep such a record from ever being signed.

Access findings are the easiest in the contractor domain to generate, because the evidence is mechanical: pull the live card list, pull the contractor register, and diff them.

A food manufacturer preparing for its BRCGS audit ran, for the first time, a reconciliation between its badge system and its contractor programme. The contractor register showed twelve workers with current jobs on site. The badge system showed forty-one live contractor credentials, several with site-wide access, the oldest issued four years earlier to an electrician whose employer no longer traded. Nobody could say which of the twenty-nine orphans still had a physical card.

The trail was easy to read in the authorisation records. Valid Until dates were set to 31 December by habit, whatever the job length. The closure section was completed on fewer than one record in five, and where it was, Card Returned was ticked while the credential stayed live in the system, because reception took cards and nobody told security. The prerequisites had been checked diligently at issue; the programme's whole weight sat on the front of the record and none on the back.

The audit raised it under site security and food defence, and the fix was structural rather than heroic: automatic expiry switched on for every contractor credential, Valid Until capped at the job end and at the earliest prerequisite expiry, and a monthly diff of live cards against open authorisations with a named owner. Six months later the reconciliation ran to zero orphans, not because people remembered, but because nothing any longer depended on their remembering.

The record is a gate that works on the day it is signed. What fails is time: the prerequisite that expires mid-grant, the job that ends without telling security, and the badge system drifting away from the register nobody diffs.

KnowContractor

Holds each authorisation against its prerequisite records, induction, register, competency, approval and insurance, and surfaces any live grant whose weakest prerequisite has lapsed.

Ella

Watches Valid Until dates and prerequisite expiries across the population, warns the contract owner before a grant dies mid-job, and chases the closure fields on every authorisation whose work completion record has landed.

KnowQuality

Ties the access scope to the food defense plan, so unescorted grants into product areas without the checks the vulnerability assessment requires show up as exceptions before an auditor finds them.

KnowSafe

Cross-references authorised areas and hours against permits and entry logs, flagging out-of-hours badging and access into covered process areas that no permit explains.

Access authorisation

A grant of entry to a named person for defined areas, hours and dates, conditional on stated prerequisites; a permission with an expiry, not a status.

Escorted access

Entry permitted only in the continuous company of an authorised host, which substitutes supervision for the checks unescorted access requires.

Unescorted access

Entry without accompaniment, which in food defense terms makes the holder an insider and pulls identity, background and area restrictions into scope.

Food defense

Protection of food from intentional adulteration; distinct from food safety, which addresses unintentional contamination, and the reason access control is a certification topic.

Actionable process step

A point in a food operation where intentional contamination could cause wide-scale harm, identified in a vulnerability assessment under the FSMA IA rule; access to these steps is what mitigation strategies restrict.

Automatic expiry

A credential configured to stop working at a set date and time without human action, converting revocation from a remembered task into a default.

Revocation

The active removal of access before its expiry, for cause or on early completion; recorded separately (CON-031) because the reason carries forward to future awards.

Right to work

The legal eligibility of a person to work in the jurisdiction, checked by the employer or agency; hosts recording who performed the check are recording where the penalty would land.