By office analytics: PACS data
The By data → PACS switch builds the analytics of the By office tab from the actual entries employees made through the physical access control system, instead of from bookings in UnSpot. It is the way to see the gap between booked a place and turned up at the office — and to judge how well bookings reflect real attendance.
What PACS mode gives you
A booking and an actual arrival are two different events. An employee can book a place and not come, come without booking, or come for an hour instead of the whole day. PACS mode shows the second side of that picture.
The typical reasons to switch it on:
- To check how closely bookings match reality before deciding to shrink or expand the office.
- To measure attendance in companies where booking a place is optional and not everyone books.
- To find the days and weeks when noticeably more or fewer people are in the office than the booking pattern suggests.
The switch lives in the Build analytics window: Filters → By data → PACS → Save.
Uploading PACS events
Entry data does not appear in UnSpot on its own: it is uploaded as a file. The Upload PACS data button sits in the top right corner of the page and is available to a Super Administrator only — other roles, including Offices and Users Administrators, do not see it.
The window has two switches and an Upload button that opens the native file dialog — there is no separate drop area for the file.
| Setting | Options | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| File format | UnSpot | Defines which columns the system reads the file by |
| Separator | Semicolon • Comma | Semicolon by default. Must match the separator used in the file |
| Encoding | UTF-8 only | Not configurable. A file in any other encoding will be read incorrectly |
| File | CSV only | Picked through the native dialog after pressing Upload. Files with other extensions are rejected |
After the upload the system reports the result: N out of M lines successfully loaded. The number of loaded lines may be lower than the number in the file, and that is normal for two reasons: repeated events of the same employee on the same day with the same direction (two entries in a row, for example) are merged into one, and events already stored in UnSpot from a previous upload or from a connected access control system are not added again. An entry and an exit of the same employee on the same day are two different events and both are kept. If the format is not recognised, Incorrect format is shown instead of the result.
The UnSpot file format
The UnSpot format follows the structure of the History of Office Visits report from the Reports section, so the easiest route is to export that report, edit it and upload it back. The system reads three columns out of the whole file; any others are ignored.
| Column | Format | What it contains | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action date | DD.MM.YYYY HH:MM | The moment of the entry. Read in the company time zone | 14.07.2026 09:12 |
| Action Type | One of two values | The direction of the passage: • in_office — entry • out_office — exit | in_office |
| Owner Email | An email address | The employee the event belongs to. Must match the email in UnSpot | jmiller@example.com |
An example of the file content with a semicolon separator:
Action date;Action Type;Owner Email 14.07.2026 09:12;in_office;jmiller@example.com 14.07.2026 18:35;out_office;jmiller@example.com 14.07.2026 09:47;in_office;rthompson@example.com
What to watch out for when preparing the file:
- The values in Action Type are strictly technical —
in_officeandout_office. Words such as Entry and Exit are not accepted: the file will upload, but every line will be rejected and the message will read 0 out of N lines successfully loaded with no explanation of why. - A line missing any of the three columns is skipped silently. Check that the headers are spelled exactly as in the table above.
- The email must belong to an existing employee. An event with an unknown address is matched to nobody and never reaches the analytics.
- One event per employee per day is enough. What matters for the analytics is the fact of presence, not the number of passages through the turnstile.
What stays on the page
PACS mode shrinks the page considerably. Only one of the four tiles keeps working.
| Tile | State in PACS mode |
|---|---|
| Desk | Works, shows the entry data |
| Parking places | Disabled, No data for this resource |
| Meeting rooms | Disabled, No data for this resource |
| Lockers | Disabled, No data for this resource |
The set of blocks inside the Desk tab stays the same — attendance, capacity potential, the pie chart, the bar chart by day of the week and the trend. What changes is their content:
- There are two segments instead of four — booked and available. Entry data has no notion of assigned or unavailable.
- No legend is shown under the pie chart. Use the legend of the bar chart below it: the colours are the same on both.
- The CSV export has different columns too — Available and Booked instead of the four place types.
How occupancy is calculated
The main rule: the number of places counted as taken on a given day equals the number of unique employees who passed through the access control system that day. An entry event is not tied to a specific desk — the system knows the person was in the office, but not where they sat.
From there the calculation repeats the logic of the bookings mode: the share of taken places is computed in place-days across the working days of the period, and the result is converted back into a number of places. Non-working days from the company calendar are left out.
Two limitations are worth knowing in advance:
- Desks switched off from booking are not excluded and fall into available. If the office has many such places, the PACS occupancy percentage will be lower, and Office potential higher, than the booking figures.
- Desks created after the end of the selected period are not counted. The creation date is compared with the end of the selected period.
Why the figures differ from bookings
A discrepancy between the two modes is not an error — it is the whole point of the comparison. It helps to know which way it usually goes.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| PACS shows more taken places than bookings | Some employees come to the office without booking. Check whether booking is mandatory under the company rules and whether people know about it |
| PACS shows fewer taken places than bookings | People book but do not turn up. Check-in policies and the automatic release of unconfirmed bookings help here |
| The two modes are close | Bookings reflect reality, and the office can be planned from them |
| PACS is empty while bookings are not | Events for the selected period simply have not been uploaded — upload the file again and check the period |
It is also worth remembering that Attendance in PACS mode counts everyone who passed through the entrance at least once during the period, while in bookings mode it counts everyone who had at least one booking. These are different sets of people, and comparing them head-on as better or worse is not sound.
