Daily occurrence book. A printable daily occurrence book sheet — a contemporaneous, timed record of everything that happened on a shift, written to survive being read out in a courtroom.
This is the paper version. SecureOptix does the same job on a phone, with the record filed against the assignment and the officer automatically.
What is on the sheet
- Site, post, date, officer and the times the shift started and finished
- A timed entry line for every event, in sequence, with no gaps left to fill in later
- Handover in and out, including anything outstanding passed to the next officer
- Visitors, contractors, deliveries and vehicle movements where the post records them
- Alarms, faults, keys issued and returned, and anything found insecure
- A signature, and a note that the book is a personal data record to be kept secure
Why this record matters
An occurrence book is a contemporaneous record, and its entire value rests on being written at the time. An entry made at the end of a shift is a recollection; an entry timed as it happened is evidence, and the difference matters enormously when a book is produced two years later in a hearing.
That is why entries run in sequence with no gaps. A book with space left to go back and fill something in is a book whose later entries can be questioned, and the convention in every well-run control room is the same: write in order, rule off unused space, never leave a line to come back to.
Corrections are made by striking through once, initialling and writing the correction alongside — never by obliterating. A book with correction fluid in it has, in one stroke, made every page in it arguable.
What goes in the book is wider than incidents. Nothing happening is a finding too: a shift where every hour is accounted for and nothing occurred is a far stronger record than a book with four entries and nine blank hours, and it is the pattern of routine entries that makes an unusual one credible.
Use it with
- Patrol record sheetA printable patrol record — the route, the points checked, the times, what was found and what was done about it.
- Security incident reportA printable incident report — what happened, in sequence, in the officer's own words, with the detail that is still useful when somebody reads it two years later.
- Assignment instructions templateA printable assignment instructions pro-forma — the site, the post, what the officer is there to do, what they are not, and what happens when something goes wrong.
- Use of force recordA printable record for an incident where physical intervention occurred — what led to it, what was done, what happened afterwards, and the reporting that has to follow.
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© 2026 SecureOptix. Free to print, copy and use in your business. Not for resale. Please keep this notice.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. General guidance, not legal advice. Checked October 2026.