How To Keep Your In-House Security Budget From Shrinking

As the leader of an in-house security team for a university, corporation, hospital, or other organization, you understand the importance of defending your budget. But keeping current funding levels or securing the additional funding you need to cover raises, new equipment, new hires, and other expenses isn’t easy.

The people who set your budget are interested in security, but they’re also interested in cutting costs. To make matters worse, if your security team is doing a great job at decreasing the number of incidents on the property, it can actually lead to a decrease in funding. After all, if there are few incidents on site, why do they need so much security?

Here are some tips to keep your budget from shrinking (and help it grow):

Highlight Day-to-Day Work

Make your bosses understand the value you bring to the organization. But don’t tell them; show them!

Most operations and accounting people will have a general idea of what your security officers do during their shifts. They see them when they come into a building and likely say goodnight to them when they leave. However, when they see the data from your guard management software laid out in a professional security summary report, the scope of what your security team actually does becomes more tangible.

Chances are, the people who set your budget are people who like data. If you can provide hard numbers for the number of incidents resolved, the number of guard tours completed, and the number of problem areas identified, you can demonstrate that your officers are a well-managed, professional team who are actively contributing to the security of the organization.

Use Data to Tie Work to Results

Using a security summary report can help you show your bosses how much your team is doing, and help convince them that your current budget is necessary to maintain the status quo.

However, in order to go from protecting your budget to getting the money you need to expand services and fund necessary initiatives, you need to be able to prove that you’re a proactive manager, not just a reactive one.

How does that work in practice? The first step is to conduct some light data analysis and correlate your data to positive trends.

Let’s say you recently increased guard tours through a particular parking garage, which led to a reduction in trespassing and vandalism incidents. With the data from your security summary report, you have evidence to show that there’s a link between the two trends.

You can also use this data to make recommendations that might prevent incidents before they happen. Let’s say this parking garage has a bathroom that tends to be a hub for problem activity. The data you’ve prepared can help support your suggestions that funding be increased for new locks, security cameras, or lighting in that location.

Document How Security Goes Above and Beyond

A lot of awesome things happen behind the scenes that administrators don’t know about. And, because they don’t get documented in reports, these activities can easily be overlooked.

One classic example comes from healthcare. People will often drive themselves to the hospital, then end up staying for days or weeks. When it comes time to leave, they’ll realize that their car battery died. Security teams at many hospitals keep a jumper system on hand to help out when this happens.

Your security team saving people a call to AAA is a valuable service that can help improve patients’ experience with the hospital. By documenting each of these instances with the help of guard management software, you can build a case for the value your team adds.

Even if you’re not in healthcare, you can probably find a few overlooked ways that your security officers help the organization, whether it’s giving directions to new students, reporting a hazard over by the go karts, or helping lost consultants find their way to their meeting.

Summary

Security is one budget item that’s always in danger of being cut. To preserve and expand your team’s security budget, show your bosses the value you create by using detailed and well-organized data. Use this data to show:

• The routine tasks your officers complete
• How guard tours reduce incident rates
• Ways your officers go the extra mile for the organization

Metrics That Protect Your Security Budget

Pick a handful of metrics and report them the same way every month. These tend to resonate most with budget owners:

Metric	What it proves	Example
Guard tours completed	Coverage is happening as planned	98% of scheduled rounds completed across all buildings this quarter
Incidents resolved	Your team handles problems before they escalate	Trespassing calls resolved on site without police involvement
Problem areas identified	Your team finds risks proactively	Broken lights and propped doors reported and fixed
Response times	Speed when it matters	Average response to alarms and service calls
Service assists	Value beyond security	Escorts, jump starts, lockouts and directions provided
Trend after a change	Your decisions work	Fewer garage incidents after adding patrols

The examples are illustrations. Use your own numbers, and see security data that wins budget for more on what to capture.

A Year-Round Budget Defense Calendar

1. Every month: Share a one-page security summary with your key stakeholders.
2. Every quarter: Review trends with leadership and connect your team’s actions to results.
3. Ninety days before budget season: Draft your case, including what you need and why.
4. At the budget meeting: Present a short summary, specific requests and the risks of cutting.
5. After funding decisions: Report back on how new funding was used and what it achieved.

What to Include in Your Budget Request

• A baseline of what your team does today, with numbers
• Results you can tie directly to your team’s actions
• The risks and likely costs if funding is cut
• Specific requests, each with a cost and an expected impact
• How you will measure and report the results

For a full walkthrough with real examples, read how to justify spending on physical security operations. If your request includes new technology, use this ROI guide for justifying security software costs.

How TrackTik Helps In-House Teams Prove Their Value

• Capture every activity. TrackTik incident reporting records incidents and service assists with time-stamped evidence.
• Verify coverage. The TrackTik security guard tour system confirms every checkpoint and round.
• See every site at once. The TrackTik Command Center gives leaders a live view of activity and response.
• Report automatically. TrackTik business intelligence turns field data into the summary reports and trends budget owners want.

Learn how TrackTik helps security teams prove ROI and visibility, or book a demo.