The Four Things Every Incident Log Must Capture
Time, person, action, outcome. Miss one, and your record stops being useful in a licensing review. Here is what a clean entry looks like.
A paper incident log is a time machine. Opened in a licensing review, it shows the authority what happened on a specific night, in what order, by which staff member, with what result.
Done well, it defends your licence. Done badly, it confirms exactly why the review was called.
Four fields do the heavy lifting. Miss any one and the record stops being useful.
1. Time
Wrong: "Late Saturday" Right: 23:47
The clock matters because incidents exist in sequence. If a fight starts at 23:30 and a 999 call is placed at 23:52, the 22 minutes in between are the question.
Log the time the incident started, the time you intervened, the time external help arrived, and the time it ended. Use 24-hour format. Do not back-date from memory.
2. Person
Wrong: "Bouncer broke up the fight" Right: "Jamie Ross (door supervisor, SIA licence 1014-3300-5271) separated the two individuals and escorted the aggressor to the exit."
Names. Roles. Licence numbers where relevant. Witnesses noted separately.
A review hearing will ask who was on shift, who attended the incident, who reported it, who signed it off. If the log just says "staff", you have lost the chain.
3. Action
Wrong: "Dealt with it" Right: "Separated parties. Confiscated the glass bottle. Asked both to leave. Used door camera to confirm exit. Logged descriptions for the blacklist."
Describe what was done in specific, observable steps. Not intent. Not interpretation. What happened.
Three short sentences are usually enough. The goal is that anyone reading the entry six months later can picture the event.
4. Outcome
Wrong: "Situation resolved" Right: "Both individuals left the premises at 23:54. Police not called. No injuries reported. No property damage. Incident discussed with duty manager at shift close."
The outcome field is the bit operators skip most. It is also the one inspectors care about most.
Did you call 999? Did anyone need medical attention? Was the offender banned? Was the council notified? Was CCTV footage preserved?
An incident without an outcome reads as unresolved. A review hearing will fill that gap with the worst possible assumption.
A clean entry looks like this
Time: 23:47 - 23:54 Person: Jamie Ross (DS, 1014-3300-5271). Witness: Sarah Clark (bar). Action: Verbal dispute escalated between two male customers near the north bar. Jamie separated parties. Confiscated a beer bottle being used as a prop. Both asked to leave; complied. CCTV footage (camera 4, 23:45-23:55) bookmarked and saved. Outcome: Both exited at 23:54 via the main entrance. No injuries. No property damage. Descriptions logged to internal blacklist. Police not called - situation did not meet escalation threshold. Duty manager (Callum Stewart) briefed at 23:58.
Four fields. One paragraph. A record that holds up.
What makes a bad log worse
- Blank sections. A missed field is a gap an investigator will notice.
- Crossing out and rewriting. Every amendment should be initialled and dated.
- Pseudonyms or shorthand. "The big lad", "the regular", "Chelsea shirt". Use actual names where you have them.
- Batched entries at end of night. Log as it happens. A log written three hours later, from memory, has already lost detail.
- Missing the quiet nights. "Nothing happened" is a valid entry. No entries at all reads as no logging.
Why digital beats paper
Paper logs get lost. Entries get rewritten. Pages get torn out. A digital log timestamps every entry at creation, attributes it to a signed-in staff member, and stores every edit with a reason.
When a licensing board asks for your incident record from 14 March, you send a PDF. Not a hunt through a ring-binder.
Holocron's incident log does the four fields automatically. Time from the device clock. Person from the signed-in staff member. Action from a short form with prompts. Outcome from a required dropdown. Exports the whole log as a single PDF ready for any licensing authority.