Running the centre
Room rack
A room rack is the grid that crosses rooms or people with the days of the month and shows who occupies each bed each night. In student accommodation it usually lives in a reception spreadsheet, and arrivals, departures and nights away are all read from it.
Also known asrack · occupancy grid · room chart · occupancy plan
How it is used in a residence
The name comes from hotels, where the rack was literally a board with a slot for each room. In a residence it is almost always a spreadsheet: one row per person or per room, one column per day and a mark on every night someone sleeps in the building. Reception keeps it, and more depends on it than it seems: how many will be at dinner, who is expected tomorrow and who is inside if the alarm goes off.
The problem is that the rack goes out of date as soon as someone leaves for a weekend without saying so. That is why it is usually checked against the absence log, the check-in of each arrival and the kitchen's headcount forecast. How Bedel reads it and hands it back: arrivals and room rack.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that the rack says who is in the building. It says who should be. Without an up-to-date record of departures and arrivals, the gap between the two is exactly what an evacuation plan is missing.
Related terms
- Check-inCheck-in is the recording of a person's arrival at their accommodation: who they are, which room they take and from when are confirmed, and they are handed the key. In a student residence it is concentrated in a few days in September and comes back, on a small scale, with every return.
- Absence logThe absence log is the record of the nights each resident spends away from the residence: when they leave, when they come back and, in many halls, what they eat on the day they leave and the day they return. Porters use it to know who is missing, and the kitchen to avoid counting people who are not there.
- Headcount forecastA headcount forecast is the estimate of how many people will eat at each sitting, built from who lives in the residence, who has said they will not come and how each day of the week usually behaves. It is the number the kitchen uses to decide how much to prepare.