Incident Reporting and Record Keeping
Why records matter
Records protect the customer, the staff member and the venue. They provide evidence of responsible service, support licence compliance, and help identify recurring problems. An incident register is usually required for refusals, ejections, injuries, altercations, suspected underage attempts and any police or ambulance attendance.
What a good entry contains
- Date, time and location in the venue.
- People involved: names or descriptions, staff and witnesses.
- What happened: factual, observable behaviour, in sequence.
- What you did: refusal, water offered, transport arranged, manager notified.
- Outcome: left by taxi at 11:40pm, police called, ambulance attended.
- Signature of the person making the entry, and the duty manager where required.
Traps in exam questions
- Writing opinions - "the customer was a drunk idiot" is useless and risky. Write "slurred speech, could not stand unaided".
- Recording only serious incidents - refusals and near misses matter too.
- Delaying the entry for hours - record as soon as practicable while memory is fresh.
- Altering or destroying records - never; correct with a dated, signed note instead.
- Confidentiality - records are not for gossip; share only with those who need them, and follow privacy law.
Worked rule of thumb
Write so a stranger could read it in six months: who, what, when, where, what you did, what happened next. Facts, not feelings.