Security guard
industry glossary

A specific position at a specific site: the main gate, the lobby desk, the dock, the overnight rover. It is the unit you bid, bill and schedule against, which is why a three-post 24/7 contract is not three officers — it is three positions that have to be filled for all 8,760 hours in the year.

Not to be confused with: A post is not a site and not a person. One client site can hold four posts, each with its own orders, its own bill rate and its own coverage requirement.

Post orders software →Guard scheduling software →

The written operating instructions for one post: what this officer does at this door, on this shift, in what order, and who they call when something falls outside the script. They are the document a client signs off on and the one an attorney asks for after an incident. Written per contract instead of per post, they turn into a binder where the dock officer reads eight pages to find the two that apply.

Not to be confused with: Post orders are not the schedule. One says what happens at the position; the other says who is standing there and when.

Post orders software →Post orders template →

The company-wide rules every officer works under regardless of assignment: uniform and grooming, radio discipline, use of force, reporting obligations, what to do when approached by media. They are written once and apply everywhere, which is what makes them cheap to maintain and easy to forget.

Not to be confused with: General orders sit underneath post orders, not beside them. When the two conflict — and they do, over things like cell phone use — the orders should say which one wins before an officer has to guess.

Post orders software →

The record of a single event that falls outside routine: a trespass, a medical, a slip and fall, property damage, a confrontation. It is written to be read by people who were not there and, often, years later — so it carries time, place, people, what was observed and what was done, in that order. The discipline that matters is separating what the officer saw from what the officer concluded.

Not to be confused with: An incident report is not a DAR entry. The DAR is the shift narrative; the incident report is a standalone document about one occurrence, and it is the one that leaves the building.

Security incident reporting software →Daily activity reports →

The shift log an officer files at the end of a tour of duty: what happened, when, who was involved, what was done. It is the deliverable most clients actually read, and the document that gets pulled months later when there is a claim. A DAR made of ten entries that all say "all clear" tells a client nothing it could not have assumed.

Not to be confused with: DAR and incident report are not interchangeable. A shift can produce one DAR and zero, one or five incident reports.

Daily activity reports →DAR template →

The handover from the officer going off shift to the one coming on: what is still open, what to watch tonight, which keys and radios change hands. It is five minutes that decide whether the next twelve hours start informed or blind, and the first thing dropped when relief runs late. Verbal pass-downs vanish with the shift; written ones survive to the next one.

Not to be confused with: A pass-down is not a signature on a relief sheet. Signing that you took the post does not establish that anything was actually handed over.

Daily activity reports →Security guard app →

A defined round of an officer through a set of checkpoints, in an order and at a frequency the contract specifies. A tour does two different jobs: it puts eyes on the parts of a property nobody else looks at, and it produces evidence for the client that someone was there. An unrecorded tour does the first job and none of the second.

Not to be confused with: A tour is not supervision. The officer walks the tour as part of the service; a field supervisor arrives from outside to inspect the service itself.

Guard tour system with QR →Security patrol software →

A physical location on a tour, marked with a tag the officer records on arrival. Checkpoints should be chosen for where somebody actually needs to look — electrical rooms, fire exits, back lots, roof access — rather than for where it is convenient to walk. A well-placed checkpoint forces the officer all the way to the spot; a badly placed one gets scanned from the doorway.

Not to be confused with: A checkpoint scan proves someone was at that location with that phone at that time. It does not by itself prove what was inspected there — that comes from the instruction attached to the checkpoint and whatever evidence the officer captured.

Guard tour system with QR →

The three ways a checkpoint gets marked. QR is a printed code read by the camera: it costs pennies, is replaced by printing another, and fades in sun and rain. NFC is a battery-free tag that requires the phone within a couple of inches, survives weather, and cannot be photocopied. BLE is a battery-powered beacon detected from several yards away, which makes it convenient across large outdoor sites and, for the same reason, weaker as proof of presence.

Not to be confused with: The choice is not about price, it is about what you need to prove. The further away a technology lets an officer register, the easier it is on the officer and the less the record establishes about where they actually stood.

Guard tour system with QR →

The mechanical ancestor of the guard tour system: a portable clock the officer carried, with numbered keys chained at stations around a property. Turning a key punched a coded mark on a paper tape, which the supervisor read the next morning. Every modern tour concept — station, hit, missed round — comes from this device, which is why so much of the vocabulary sounds mechanical.

Not to be confused with: Watch clock data was reviewed after the fact, never live. That is the actual difference from an electronic tour: the missed round is visible while the shift is still running, not the next morning.

Guard tour system with QR →

A marked vehicle covering several client sites on a route, stopping at each for a short check rather than standing a post. It is what a client buys when a dedicated officer is not justified: presence and a record of visits at a fraction of the hourly cost. The service is sold in stops per night, and the argument with clients is almost always about randomised timing.

Not to be confused with: Mobile patrol is not the same as alarm response, even when the same vehicle does both. One is a scheduled route, the other is an unscheduled dispatch that interrupts it.

Security patrol software →GPS guard tracking →

A virtual boundary drawn on the map around a site, used to condition an action: allow a clock-in only on the property, or flag a vehicle leaving its assigned area. The radius is an operational decision rather than a technical one — tight boundaries produce false rejections inside buildings with poor signal, and loose ones let an officer clock in from the parking lot across the street.

Not to be confused with: A geofence is not GPS tracking. The fence answers inside or outside a boundary; tracking records the path.

Guard time and attendance →GPS guard tracking →

The record of officers clocking on and off post, which serves two masters at once: payroll and proof of coverage for the client. Done on a phone with location and a server timestamp, it replaces the classic problem of the paper sheet signed at the end of the pay period in one handwriting. It is also the natural trigger for the open-post alert.

Not to be confused with: Clocked hours are not billable hours. An officer who clocks in forty minutes before contracted coverage begins has created payroll, not revenue.

Guard time and attendance →Security guard payroll and billing →

Both the act of replacing an officer at the end of a shift and the officer who does it. It also names the position that exists only to cover others — the relief officer who absorbs days off, vacations and sickness across several sites. A schedule with no relief built into it cannot give anyone a day off without creating overtime.

Not to be confused with: Relief is not the same as pass-down. Relief is the change of person; the pass-down is the information that has to move with it.

Guard scheduling software →

A scheduled shift that starts with nobody standing it. It is the most expensive failure in contract security because it is the one the client can see without reading a single report. What separates operations is not whether they get open posts — everyone does — but how fast they find out: a gap caught in ten minutes gets filled, a gap caught in six hours has already been noticed by the client.

Guard scheduling software →Guard time and attendance →

An officer notifying that they will not work a shift they were scheduled for. The rate at which call-offs happen is the number that makes a schedule unpredictable and decides how much bench an account needs. Measured per site, per weekday and per shift, it says far more than a company-wide average — call-offs cluster on Friday nights and holiday weekends.

Not to be confused with: A call-off is not a no-show. One gives the scheduler hours to fill the post; the other is discovered when the client asks where the officer is.

Guard scheduling software →

Keeping the officer who just finished a shift on post because their relief did not arrive. It is the instinctive answer to an open post, and it is used far more often than anybody reports. It carries three costs that rarely get added up: the overtime premium, the fatigue of somebody now working sixteen or twenty-four hours, and the turnover it produces once it becomes routine.

Guard scheduling software →Security guard payroll and billing →

The contracted hours actually filled by a person who is present. It is the metric clients feel before any other, because an absence needs no report to be noticed. Coverage is lost three ways: a call-off nobody backfilled, an officer who left post early, and a schedule that had a hole in it from the day it was built.

Not to be confused with: Coverage is not paid hours. You can pay hours that covered nothing and you can cover hours that never got billed.

Guard scheduling software →

The rate at which officers leave and have to be replaced, counted over a year. It matters operationally rather than sentimentally: every departure costs a background check, licensing, onboarding, site training and a stretch of hold-overs while the post is short. Turnover concentrated in one account usually points at that account rather than at the labour market.

Security guard app →How to evaluate guard management software →

An officer working with nobody within sight or earshot: the warehouse overnight, the construction site on a Sunday, the remote substation. The risk is not only assault — it is that if something happens, nobody knows until relief arrives. The standard operational answer is the periodic check-in: the officer confirms they are fine at a set interval, and failing to confirm escalates.

Not to be confused with: Lone worker does not mean unsupervised post. A post can have exactly one officer on it and tight supervision, and that is the objective.

Lone worker and man down →GPS guard tracking →

A signal raised when an officer’s phone or device detects a fall or a prolonged lack of motion, without anyone pressing anything. It is the counterpart to the panic button for the case where the officer cannot ask for help. Because it fires on its own, the procedure matters as much as the detection: who receives it, how long you try to reach the officer, and what happens when nobody answers.

Not to be confused with: Man down is not the panic button. Panic is deliberate; man down is automatic, which means it produces false positives the procedure has to absorb without anyone learning to ignore it.

Lone worker and man down →Panic button for security guards →

A signal the officer raises deliberately when they need help now, from their phone or a dedicated device. The button is the easy part; what matters is what happens next — who it reaches, how it is acknowledged, and how long until somebody is on the way. A panic signal that lands in an inbox nobody watches overnight is worse than none, because it creates confidence with nothing behind it.

Panic button for security guards →Push-to-talk radio for security guards →

Short for "be on the lookout" — a description of a person or vehicle circulated so that whoever is on duty watches for it. In contract security it usually arrives from a client, from law enforcement or from a neighbouring property, and it is passed along at shift change. What makes one useful is an expiry: a description still circulating three weeks later stops being read.

Not to be confused with: A BOLO is not an arrest order and does not authorise an officer to intervene. It is information to observe and report.

A facility that receives alarm, fire and video signals from third-party systems and handles them under a defined procedure. It is a regulated, certifiable thing: in the United States the reference standard for a central-station listing is UL 827, which sets out redundancy, minimum staffing and how quickly signals must be handled, with annual audits behind the listing.

Not to be confused with: This is the vocabulary mistake that gives people away in this industry. A central station is NOT a guard company’s dispatch desk — different infrastructure, different certification, different service being sold. Calling a room with two radios and a laptop a "monitoring centre" is a promise the facility cannot keep.

Security dispatch software →

A guard company’s own operations desk: the people who know which posts are filled right now, take incoming reports from the field, arrange relief and send a supervisor or a patrol vehicle when something happens. Its raw material is your own officers at your own sites, not third-party alarm signals.

Not to be confused with: It is not a central station, even when it sits in the same room and sometimes with the same people. If one team does both, keep the procedures apart: a client alarm and an open post compete for the same attention at exactly the wrong moment.

Security dispatch software →Push-to-talk radio for security guards →

The supervisor who drives a territory: visits posts across several accounts, checks appearance and adherence to orders, handles problems on site and closes the loop between the officer and the office. It is the role where almost everything that never reaches a report gets caught. The output is the site visit record — what was found, what was corrected, what was promised.

Not to be confused with: A supervisor visit does not replace the officer’s tour, or the other way round. One is external inspection of the service; the other is the service.

GPS guard tracking →Security patrol software →

The model where the service is delivered by a person present on site: a static post, a foot or vehicle patrol, access control at a lobby. It is the most expensive model per hour and the only one that can intervene, deter by presence and deal with whoever walks up to the desk. Most large contracts now blend it with electronic coverage.

Industries we serve →Platform features →

Coverage delivered by cameras, sensors and analytics watched from elsewhere, with a human response only when there is an event. It costs less per covered hour and scales across large or empty sites, and its limit is obvious: it sees, it does not intervene.

Not to be confused with: Replacing officers with remote video is not a change of vendor, it is a change of service. Response time changes and who arrives changes, so the contract should say what happens between detection and somebody being on scene.

Visitor management for security companies →

The lobby function of signing in visitors, contractors and deliveries: who came, who they were there to see, when they arrived and when they left. For a guard company it is usually the most visible service in the building, because every employee of the client walks past it. The paper visitor book is also, quietly, a privacy problem — every arrival can read the previous entries.

Visitor management for security companies →Client portal for security companies →

The hourly price a security company charges a client for a post. It has to carry the officer’s wage, employer taxes and insurance, supervision, uniforms and equipment, overhead and margin. It is agreed per post and per hour type: nights, weekends and holidays do not price the same.

Not to be confused with: Bill rate is not the officer’s wage plus a percentage. Treating it that way is how contracts get signed that lose money from the first invoice.

Security guard payroll and billing →How much does security guard software cost →

What the company pays the officer per hour worked, before premiums and employer costs. It is the number that competes in the labour market and therefore the number that decides whether a post can be filled without hold-overs. When a minimum wage rises mid-contract, it rises underneath bill rates that were fixed a year earlier.

Security guard payroll and billing →Pricing →

The difference between the bill rate and the pay rate on an hour of service. It is a gross figure that still has to pay employer taxes, insurance, supervision, equipment and overhead before anything is left, so it is not profit — it is what exists before most of the cost. It erodes invisibly in two places: overtime paid at a premium and billed at straight time, and wage increases inside a fixed-price contract.

Not to be confused with: Spread is not margin. An account can hold a healthy spread every month and still lose money.

Security guard payroll and billing →

Hours worked beyond the threshold set by law or contract, paid at a premium. In contract security overtime is rarely a decision — it appears when somebody calls off and the officer on post gets held over. The monthly overtime figure is, in practice, a measurement of call-offs and of a schedule that never had enough people in it.

Not to be confused with: Overtime is almost never billed at the premium it is paid at. That difference comes out of the spread on the account, not out of the client.

Security guard payroll and billing →Guard scheduling software →

In the United Kingdom, the licence the Security Industry Authority issues to an individual security operative. Whether a licence is required depends on the activity being carried out rather than the job title. The licence belongs to the person: it moves with them between employers.

Not to be confused with: The SIA licenses people, not companies. There is no such thing as an "SIA licensed company" — a business seeking recognition applies to the Approved Contractor Scheme instead.

CGuardPro in the UK →

The SIA’s voluntary quality-assurance scheme for private security businesses in the United Kingdom. A company is assessed against a set of business criteria covering areas such as staff training, financial management and health and safety, and approved contractors appear on a public register. Many public-sector and large corporate tenders require it.

Not to be confused with: ACS approval covers the business; SIA licensing covers each individual operative. A company needs its officers licensed regardless of whether it is an approved contractor, and participation in the scheme is a choice rather than a legal requirement.

CGuardPro in the UK →

The bureau of the Texas Department of Public Safety that regulates the private security profession in the state, under Chapter 1702 of the Texas Occupations Code — the Private Security Act. It licenses security companies, registers individual officers, runs fingerprint-based background checks, investigates complaints and acts against unlicensed activity. Its scope covers armed and unarmed guards, personal protection officers, private investigators, alarm companies and locksmiths.

Not to be confused with: Texas private security is regulated by DPS, not by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. TDLR licenses many other Texas occupations, which is why the mix-up is common — and why sending an application to the wrong agency costs weeks.

Texas security guard software →