Overview
Every GoTag doubles as a public compliance record. Anyone — a site gate officer, an auditor, a principal contractor's rep, another contractor sharing the site — can scan a machine's GoTag with an ordinary phone camera and see its current status immediately. No PreStartGo account, no app install, no login.
Tip
This is the whole point of the public logbook: compliance status shouldn't require the checker to be a PreStartGo customer. See Scanning a GoTag for how the scan itself works.
What the page shows
The logbook opens as a single page — scroll for more detail. From top to bottom:
| Section | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Equipment | Name, photo (if on file), make/model/year, and identifiers like plant number or registration |
| Compliance status | A status badge, the result and date of the most recent pre-start, and counts of open and critical defects |
| Service schedule | Upcoming or overdue service, where the organisation has opted to show it |
| Current operator | Shown only when the machine is on loan to another organisation |
| Recent checks | The last several pre-starts, with operator identity per the owning organisation's privacy setting |
| Documents and service | Recent linked documents and completed service work, where available |
What it deliberately doesn't show
The public view is a summary, not a record dump:
- Defects appear as counts — how many open, how many critical — never as an itemised list of descriptions or photos. That detail stays inside the platform for your team.
- Operator identity is your call. The owning organisation chooses how operators appear on public check history: initials (the default), full name, or not at all.
- It's read-only. There is nothing on the page a member of the public can click that changes any record, and nothing that reveals your wider fleet — one tag shows one machine.
Who this is for, in practice
- Gate officers — a ten-second check that a machine arriving on site has a current passing pre-start, before it goes to work.
- Auditors and regulators — evidence on the spot, without waiting for someone to export a report.
- Principal contractors — visibility over subcontractor plant on their site without needing accounts for it.
- Hire customers — a machine's compliance state at handover and return, visible to both sides of the transaction.
Equipment without an Interlock
The public logbook looks and works exactly the same whether or not the equipment has an Interlock fitted. A GoTag-only machine still gets a full public compliance record — it just isn't physically prevented from starting the way an Interlock-equipped machine is. See Interlock overview for the difference.
Edge cases
- A code that resolves to nothing — an uninstalled tag, or a mistyped short code — shows a plain "not found" page. Nothing about an unlinked code exposes any organisation's data, and there is no way to browse from one machine's page to anything else.
- A machine on hire shows its current operating organisation, so a gate officer can see both who owns the machine and who is running it — see Cross-Org Equipment Rental.
- A freshly tagged machine with no inspections yet shows its identity with an empty compliance history — an honest "no pre-starts recorded" rather than an error.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The page won't load after a scan | No mobile coverage at the machine | The logbook is served live — move to coverage and rescan |
| "Not found" page | Tag not installed against any machine | A Technician can install or replace the tag — see Re-Tagging Equipment |
| Status looks out of date | The most recent inspection was done offline | Offline pre-starts appear once the operator's phone syncs — usually minutes after coverage returns |
| An operator's full name is visible and shouldn't be | Org privacy setting is set to full name | The Account Owner changes it: Organisation → Details → Policies → Public logbook |