Why Guard Management Software Should Top Your List of Resolutions

Trackforce

December 18, 2015 · 10 min read

Guard management software as a growth priority for a security business

At the turn of a year, it’s always good to reflect on personal and business development. Looking back over twelve months, it is satisfying to see how much you have grown, how much your career has grown, and how your relationships with family and friends have developed.

The end of the year is also an awesome time for the owners of security businesses to look at where they are now and set a trajectory for where they want to be twelve months from now.

Key takeaways

Guard management software is the highest-leverage change most security firms can make.
It touches reporting, patrols, payroll and billing at the same time, which very few other investments do.
The cost of waiting is real even though it never appears on an invoice.
Unbilled hours, disputed reports and manual admin get paid for every month you stay on paper.
Buying software is not the same as adopting it.
A system nobody is trained on returns nothing, so plan the rollout before you sign anything.
Evaluate three vendors, not one.
Three demos run against the same list of your own scenarios is the fastest way to see where the platforms genuinely differ.
TrackTik is built for the whole operation rather than one task.
Tours, incident reporting, dispatch, scheduling and invoicing run on one record, so the savings compound instead of moving a problem from one tool into another.

Guard Management Software: A High Impact Investment For The Year Ahead

If you’re not already using guard management software, there is nothing you can do this year that will have more impact on your business. Whether you choose TrackTik or another platform, these systems give you paperless reports, the ability to manage patrols in real time, and more. Make a resolution to reach out to the key providers in the industry early in the year so you can implement a system well before the second half.

You have to look at guard management software right now because:

Demand for physical security keeps climbing, and buyers now ask for far more documentation than they used to.
In spite of this, clients aren’t always ready to pay adequately for security.
It sometimes can be difficult to put good quality staff out in the field because of financial limits in our contracts.

Guard management software can make it easier for you to grow your company with quality services at lower costs. If you want the arithmetic behind that, the high cost of not using guard management software breaks down what staying manual actually takes out of a contract.

What Guard Management Software Actually Replaces

The business case gets much easier to make when you stop talking about software and start listing the manual steps that disappear. Most firms recognise every row in the left-hand column below.

The manual way	What it becomes
Officer writes a paper report, supervisor retypes it	Report filed once on a phone and delivered to the client the same day
Calling the site to check whether a patrol happened	Checkpoint scans with time and location attached
Timesheets chased at the end of the week	Attendance captured at clock-in and carried straight into payroll
Invoices rebuilt by hand and then disputed	Billing generated from the hours the client can already see
Incidents discovered at the monthly review	Escalation the moment the report is submitted

Each row is a few minutes of admin. Multiplied across every officer, every shift and every site, those minutes are the margin you have been giving away.

The Guard Management Software Advantage

We’re not telling you to get software because we’re a software company. We’re telling you to get software to get an advantage. Guard management software will:

Reduce your costs,
Reduce your paperwork,
Reduce your time,
Reduce your liabilities, and
Give you an advantage in your business.

We’re very passionate about it because the people who use it cut costs and grow their businesses.

Buying guard management software and then leaving it unused is the one outcome worth avoiding, and it is more common than vendors admit. There is a lot of technology out there and the options can look overwhelming, which is exactly why it pays to look at them properly rather than not at all. Our team has been in your shoes doing the day to day in the security business, so we know the issues and the challenges you face. We recommend software because we have used it, and we have seen incredible results and impact.

How To Get Real Value From Three Demos

Book three hours. Schedule three demos so you and your team can look at three different solutions, then talk with your team about what might work for you. The difference between a useful demo and a sales presentation is whether you set the agenda, so go in with the same five scenarios for every vendor.

Make them file a real incident. Hand over one of your own recent incidents and ask the vendor to enter it live, from the officer’s phone through to the version the client receives.
Ask what happens when a checkpoint is missed. Every platform records a completed tour. The useful question is who gets told, how fast, and whether it reaches a supervisor before it reaches your client.
Follow one shift all the way to an invoice. Ask them to show a shift becoming attendance, attendance becoming payroll, and payroll becoming a billable line. This is where platforms separate most sharply.
Test it on a bad phone and a weak signal. Your officers are not working on new handsets in perfect coverage. Ask what the app does offline and what happens to the data when it reconnects.
Ask who configures it after go-live. If every new site, post order or report template needs a support ticket, the running cost is higher than the licence suggests.

If you want a longer checklist to take into those meetings, we keep one in 20 questions to ask before buying guard management software, and our guard management software comparison sets the main platforms side by side.

What You Get On Day One With TrackTik

TrackTik is the security workforce management platform from Trackforce, and it is built so the pieces below share one operating record rather than sitting in separate systems that have to be reconciled later.

Patrols you can prove. The security guard tour app timestamps every checkpoint scan, which turns a patrol schedule into evidence you can hand a client.
Reports written once. ReportPro AI turns an officer’s account into a clear, consistent report, so quality no longer depends on which officer was on shift.
Dispatch that keeps a record. Security guard dispatch logs the call, the assignment and the response time instead of leaving it in somebody’s phone history.
Billing that matches the work. Contracts and invoicing bills from the same attendance data the client can see, which removes the most common source of disputes.
One place to see the operation. The TrackTik platform keeps scheduling, tours, incidents, dispatch and billing together, so a change in one place does not create work in another.

Blackbird Security used TrackTik’s automation to cut manual administrative work out of its operation, then scaled nationally on the same platform.
Read the Blackbird Security case study

A Realistic First Ninety Days

Most disappointing software projects in this industry are adoption failures rather than product failures. A staged rollout is what keeps that from happening.

Days 1 to 30: one site, done properly. Pick a single cooperative site, load its post orders, checkpoints and report templates, and get the officers there genuinely fluent before you go wider.
Days 31 to 60: add the reporting the client sees. Turn on the client-facing reporting for that one account and let them react to it. Their feedback shapes how you configure everything after it.
Days 61 to 90: connect payroll and billing. Once field data is trustworthy, route it into payroll and invoicing. This is the stage where the investment starts paying for itself.

Firms that run this sequence tend to reach the point where the software is load bearing within a quarter. Firms that switch everything on everywhere in week one usually end up back on paper alongside a licence they are still paying for. If you want to see what that rollout looks like against your own site list, you can book a TrackTik demo and work through it with your own contract dates in front of you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Guard management software is the system a security firm runs its field operation on. It handles guard tours and checkpoints, incident reporting, scheduling and attendance, dispatch, and the reporting the client receives. The point of it is a single record of what actually happened on site, which is what makes service delivery provable rather than described. TrackTik guard management covers all of it on one platform.

Usually yes, and often sooner than owners expect, because the savings are administrative rather than headcount based. A small firm feels the benefit fastest in three places: report writing time, chasing timesheets, and invoice disputes. Those costs scale with the number of shifts you run, not the size of your company, so a ten-officer operation on paper is already paying them. Business administration in TrackTik is where most of that manual work disappears.

Plan for a quarter rather than a weekend. A single site can be configured and running in days, but the sequence that sticks is one site first, then client-facing reporting, then payroll and billing, which is roughly a ninety day arc. Timelines vary with how many sites you run and how clean your existing post orders are, so treat any promise of an instant company-wide switch with caution.

They will if it removes work rather than adding it. Adoption tends to fail where officers are asked to complete a paper form and then enter the same information again on a phone. Run one process in one place, keep the reporting flow short, and make sure the app behaves on older handsets and weak signal. The TrackTik tour app is designed for scanning checkpoints and filing reports in the field, which is where most of an officer’s interaction with the system happens.

A tour app proves a patrol happened. TrackTik carries that same record through to the rest of the business, so a scan, an incident, a shift and an invoice all reference one source of truth. That matters because the largest savings are not in the tour itself, they are in payroll and billing no longer being rebuilt by hand. Business intelligence then reports across every site, which a single-purpose app cannot do.

Before a renewal or a bid, not after one. Buying in the quiet part of your year means you are configured and fluent by the time a client asks for reporting you cannot currently produce, and it lets you evaluate properly instead of under deadline. If a tender is already on the table, look at it now anyway. You can compare platforms in our buyer’s guide or book a TrackTik demo to work through the timing against your own contract dates.