Resources / DAR template
Free Template
Daily activity report template
for security officers
Most DAR forms fail in the same place. They have a box for the date and a large empty area headed remarks, and what comes back is a paragraph with no times in it. This template is set out as three blocks — a header filled in once, an entry table used all shift, and a closing block signed at the end — with the reason each field exists. Copy it into your own document and cut what your contracts do not need.
The template is on this page. There is no file to download and no address to hand over. Select it, paste it into your own template, put your logo on it and change whatever does not fit your operation.
Block 1 — the header, filled in once
Completed at the start of the shift, before the first round.
Client / account
The billing entity, not the building nickname. This is the field that groups a year of reports when the account manager asks for them.
Site and post
Site plus the specific position: Riverside Plaza / Main Lobby. A report filed against a site with four posts tells you almost nothing about which door.
Report date
The calendar date the shift started, even when the shift crosses midnight. Pick this rule once and write it at the top of the form, because half the disputes about night logs are really disputes about which day an entry belongs to.
Shift start and end
Scheduled times and, separately, actual times. If they differ, the reason goes in the closing block.
Officer name and licence number
Printed, not initialled. A signature that cannot be read identifies nobody.
Relieved by / relieving
The officer handing over and the officer taking over, both named.
Weather and conditions
One line. It matters more than it looks: it explains a slip-and-fall, a delayed round, an alarm from a branch on a fence, and a camera with nothing usable on it.
Equipment issued
Radio number, keys, fob, vehicle and mileage in. Anything you have to account for at the end of the shift belongs here at the start of it.
Block 2 — the entry table, used all shift
Seven columns. Every line in the shift uses all seven, and a blank column is a deliberate statement rather than an omission.
Time
24-hour clock, to the minute. Never a range, never approximately.
Location
Where on the site, precisely enough that a stranger could stand there: north dock roll-up door, stairwell B level 3, not the back.
Type
A short fixed list you reuse: patrol, access, alarm, maintenance, medical, trespass, vehicle, delivery, client contact, other. Fixed types are what let you count a year of these.
Observation
What the officer saw, in plain words, in the order it happened.
Action taken
What the officer did about it. An observation with no action is an unfinished entry unless the action was deliberately none.
Notified
Who was told, at what time, and by what means. Blank means nobody was told, and that is a statement in itself.
Ref
Incident number, work order, police report, camera clip reference. The field that turns a log line into something retrievable.
Three worked entries
The difference between a log that is worth something and one that is not is visible in a single line. These are the shape to aim for.
0214 · Stairwell B, level 3 · Patrol
Exterior door to level 3 stairwell found unsecured, latch taped over.
Tape removed, door secured and tested. Photographed.
Notified: Site supervisor R. Delgado 0217 by radio. Ref: none.
0338 · North dock, roll-up 4 · Trespass
Male, approx. 6ft, grey hooded sweatshirt, walked from east fence line to dock 4 and pulled at the shutter handle. Challenged from 15ft; left westbound on foot toward Arlington Ave.
Perimeter checked, no damage found, no entry gained.
Notified: Police non-emergency 0341, no unit dispatched. Client contact voicemail 0345. Ref: IR-2026-0413.
0400 · Full perimeter · Patrol
Round 5 of 6 completed. All doors secured, lighting normal, no persons observed.
No action required.
Notified: none. Ref: none.
Block 3 — the closing block, signed at the end
Completed before handover, with the relief present where possible.
Total entries and rounds completed
The count, and against it the count expected. A shift with three of six rounds is a supervision item, not a rounding error.
Open items for the next shift
The one section a relief officer will definitely read. Keep it to things that require an action, not a summary of the night.
Equipment returned
Radio, keys, vehicle, mileage out. Discrepancies go in as an entry, not as a scribble in the margin.
Officer signature and time
Signed at the end of the shift by the person who wrote it.
Supervisor review
Name, time and either accepted or returned for correction. An unreviewed log is a log nobody has read.
Six rules that decide whether it is worth anything
Write it as it happens, not at 05:50
A log reconstructed in the last ten minutes of a shift has the wrong times on every line, and wrong times are the first thing a lawyer finds. Entries written live are also shorter and more specific, because the officer is not summarising from memory.
Record the nothing
A shift with two entries reads as a shift where the officer did nothing. Each completed round is an entry, with a time and a route. The value of a quiet log is that it proves presence, and it only proves presence if presence was written down.
Observations, not conclusions
Write a male, roughly six feet, grey hoodie, walked from the east fence to the loading dock and left when challenged. Do not write a suspicious subject was casing the property. The first survives cross-examination and the second is an opinion the officer is not qualified to give.
Names, numbers, plates and times
Anything that can be recorded exactly should be. A plate, a badge number, a unit number, a phone number, a time to the minute. Everything vague in a report is a place where somebody else later fills in a version that suits them.
Never leave a gap and never overwrite
On paper, draw a single line through an error, initial it and write the correction beside it. Do not obliterate, do not use correction fluid, do not tear out a page. A log with a removed page is worth less in a claim than no log at all.
One severe event does not belong in the log
An assault, an arrest, a fire, a serious injury or a significant loss gets a line in the daily log and a separate incident report of its own. Trying to fit a major event into a table column guarantees the detail that matters is missing.
Questions officers and account managers ask
What is a daily activity report?+
It is the chronological record of one officer, on one post, for one shift: every round walked, every person and vehicle admitted, every alarm, every observation, and what was done about each. In contract guarding it is the primary evidence that the service you invoiced was actually delivered, and it is the first document produced when a client, an insurer or a court asks what happened on a given night.
How is a DAR different from an incident report?+
The DAR is continuous and covers the whole shift. An incident report is a single document about one significant event, and it goes into depth the log has no room for: a narrative, a witness list, statements, photographs, and the police or medical reference. A serious event appears in both — one line in the log pointing to the incident report by number.
How long should each entry be?+
One to three sentences for a routine entry. If it is longer than that, it is either an incident that deserves its own report, or the officer is narrating rather than recording. Length is not the measure of a good log; a shift with twenty-two precise, timed lines is far more useful than one with three paragraphs of prose.
Who is allowed to read or amend a completed report?+
Read access usually extends to the supervisor, the account manager and, under most contracts, the client for their own site. Amendment is different: once a shift is closed, the officer who wrote it should not be quietly editing it. Corrections belong in a supplemental entry that is dated and signed, so the record shows both what was written and what was later corrected.
How long do we keep them?+
Longer than feels necessary, and you should confirm the actual period rather than take a number from a template. Retention is set by your jurisdiction, your insurer and often by the client contract itself, and the periods do not agree with each other. The practical rule is that claims surface long after everyone has forgotten the shift, so the file has to outlive the memory.
Should the client see the log?+
In most contract relationships, yes, and it is usually to your advantage. A client reading a detailed nightly log sees what they are paying for; a client who receives nothing until something goes wrong only ever encounters your paperwork in a bad moment. Agree at the contract stage what is shared and how quickly, so it is a routine rather than a favour.
What does the digital version change?+
The three fields officers cannot forge or forget on paper. Every entry carries the system time rather than a handwritten one, the author is the authenticated user rather than a signature, and a photograph can be attached to the observation it belongs to. The searching is what supervisors notice first, but the reason it holds up in a claim is the timestamp and the named author.
What happens to an entry filed with no signal?+
In CGuardPro an incident written with no connection is held on the phone and sent when signal returns, and it keeps the time it actually happened rather than the time it uploaded. Visitor entries and the start and finish of a tour queue the same way. Two things do not: clocking in needs a live connection, and a checkpoint scan is timestamped by the server when it arrives.
The three fields paper cannot enforce
A form can ask for a time, an author and a photograph. It cannot make them true. In CGuardPro the time comes from the system, the author is whoever is logged in, and the photograph is taken at the moment of the observation — and the whole year is searchable by site, officer and date.