A digital refusals register your licensing officer can read

Every refused age-restricted sale recorded in seconds, by the person who refused it, from the bar or from the till — and produced as a PDF or a CSV the moment somebody asks to see the book.

14-day free trial, no credit card. Included in Core at £59 per site per month.

An empty register over a busy period is the thing inspectors notice

A paper refusals book fails in one specific way, and it is not dishonesty. It is that the book lives in the office and the refusal happens at the bar. By the time anyone walks back to write it up, service has moved on, and the entry either gets made from memory at the end of the night or does not get made at all. A quiet book is the result of the walk, not of the door policy.

Licensing officers know this. If you operate a Challenge 25 policy across a busy weekend and the register shows nothing at all, the register is not evidence that nobody tried — it reads as evidence that nobody was challenging, or that nobody was recording. Neither is a good position at a review. A register that fills itself in the moment, from a phone behind the bar or from the till's age-verification prompt, is a different document entirely.

What gets recorded

• When the refusal happened, not when it was typed up
• The member of staff who refused, and the site
• What was refused, in free text, and a description of what happened
• Reason: underage, no valid ID, proxy purchase, intoxicated or other
• Apparent age judged, whether ID was asked for, and what was produced

Built the way a book of record should be

Anybody can write in it, nobody can quietly rewrite it

Write access is granted widely by default, down to team members, bartenders and hosts, within their own sites. That is the same reasoning as the accident book: the person who was there is the person who should write the entry, and a book that only a duty manager can open is a book that gets filled in from memory. Entries can be edited, and withdrawing one is manager level, done as a soft delete with a reason. Nothing is ever removed, so the history a licensing officer sees is the history that happened.

Entries straight from the till

Where you run ZynthioEPOS, the age-verification prompt on the till is a route into the same book. A refusal taken at the point of sale writes directly, is protected against duplicates, and is tagged with where it came from so that a till entry and a typed back-office entry are never confused. The till side is gated on the EPOS module rather than on the Refusal Book itself, which means a till can always record a refusal even where the back-office module is switched off for that organisation.

Private by design

No detail of the person refused is recorded anywhere: no name, no address, no contact details, no date of birth, no photograph, no identifier. The register is a record of your team's conduct, not a file on a member of the public, and it is built that way on purpose. On the till, the date-of-birth check computes the age on the device and sends only the apparent age — the date itself is never transmitted and never stored. "None" is a real answer to what ID was produced, and it is the commonest one in a real book.

An export you can hand over

Filter the book by date, site, staff member or reason, then export it as CSV or PDF. The export runs exactly the same query as the list on screen and returns the whole filtered set rather than the page you happen to be on, so what you hand over is complete. Columns are date and time, site, member of staff, goods refused, reason, apparent age, whether ID was asked for, what was produced, how the entry was made and what happened — and the ID column prints as a plain Yes or No, because "No" is the cell an officer stops on. A single-site export is headed with the venue name.

One book per premises, across a whole estate

Access is scoped to the sites a person is allocated to, so a general manager sees their venue and an area manager sees theirs. At group level you can see which premises are recording refusals and which are silent, which is the pattern worth acting on before anybody else notices it. Entries are timed to when the refusal happened rather than when they were typed, so writing the book up at the end of service still backdates correctly.

Part of a licensing file, not a standalone app

A refusals register is one document in a bundle. The rest of the bundle lives in the same platform, on the same sites.

Audits

A Licensing, Age Verification & Premises Security template is one of ten UK audit templates, scored with weighted sections and Green, Amber and Red bands.

Training

Evidence that the team refusing sales was trained to do it, held against the same people and the same sites as the register itself.

EPOS & Till

The age-verification prompt at the point of sale writes into the register directly, tagged as a till entry and protected against duplicates.

Pricing. The Refusals register is one of the nine modules in Core at £59 per site per month, alongside Checklists & Monitoring, Defect Management, Audits, HACCP, COSHH, Risk Assessments, Reporting and Recipes. Unlimited users on every site, and annual billing gives you two months free. See the full pricing page.

Refusals register questions

Who is allowed to write in the refusals register?

Anybody with a login, within their own sites. That is deliberate and it is granted widely by default, down to team members, bartenders and hosts, because the person who made the refusal is the person who should record it and a book only one manager can write in is a book that gets written up from memory on a Tuesday. Withdrawing an entry is manager level and is a soft delete with a reason attached. Nothing is ever removed.

Does the register store details about the person refused?

No detail of the person refused is recorded anywhere. No name, no address, no contact details, no date of birth, no photograph and no identifier. What is recorded is the apparent age your team judged, whether ID was asked for and what was produced. Where the entry comes from a ZynthioEPOS till, the date-of-birth check computes the age on the device and sends only the apparent age, so the date itself is never transmitted or stored.

Can entries be created from the till?

Yes. A refusal recorded at a ZynthioEPOS till from the age-verification prompt writes straight into the same book, protected against duplicates, and is tagged with where it came from so a back-office entry and a till entry are distinguishable. The till side is gated on the EPOS module rather than on the Refusal Book, so a till can always record a refusal even where the back-office module is switched off.

What do I hand a licensing officer?

The register exports to CSV and to PDF, and the export is open to anybody who can read the book. It runs the same query as the list on screen and returns the whole filtered set rather than the page you happen to be looking at. Columns are date and time, site, member of staff, goods refused, reason, apparent age, whether ID was asked for, what was produced, how the entry was made and what happened. A single-site export is headed with the venue name, because a refusals register is a document about a premises.

What if we genuinely had no refusals?

Then record none, but understand how it reads. A day with no refusals at all is itself a finding, and an officer looking at an empty register across a busy trading period is not reassured by it. Zynthio surfaces the same question to you first: an empty book shows on the day view as a prompt asking whether anyone is actually challenging, which is a better place to find out than across a table from your licensing officer.

Related guides

Practical guides from the Zynthio team on this part of running a venue.

Alcohol licensing compliance: what to show on inspection

Licensing officers can call unannounced. Here is the alcohol licensing compliance evidence to have ready: DPS records, ID checks and refusals logs.

More operator guides on the Zynthio blog. How we write them: editorial policy.

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Or start at the beginning on the Zynthio homepage, try it with sample data on the live demo, or read practical operator guides on the blog.

Have the book ready before you are asked for it

Start a 14-day free trial with no card, or book a call and we will look at how your venues record refusals today.