A guard tour system that proves every patrol actually happened
Checkpoints on NFC, QR or GPS. Live patrol monitoring. Automatic alerts when a point is missed. And a report your client can read without asking you what it means.
The problem with paper patrol sheets
Every security company has had the same conversation. A client rings on Monday morning and asks whether the night patrols were done. You say yes. They ask you to prove it. You send a photograph of a signed sheet — which, both of you know, could have been filled in at 6am in the car park.
An electronic guard tour system ends that conversation. Instead of a signature, you have a record: checkpoint name, exact time, GPS coordinates, and the officer who scanned it. It cannot be back-filled and it cannot be argued with.
From tag on a wall to report in an inbox
Four moving parts, and only one of them involves the guard doing anything.
You place checkpoints
Stick an NFC tag or a printed QR label at each place a guard should reach — fire door, gate, plant compound, roof access. Or drop a GPS point on a map if you would rather not fit anything.
You define the route
Set which checkpoints belong to which patrol, how many tours a night, and how far apart they should be. This is where "hourly external patrol" stops being a promise and becomes a rule.
The guard scans
The officer taps their phone on the tag or scans the code. One action, under two seconds, works with gloves on and works with no signal.
You get the proof
Scans appear live on your dashboard. Missed checkpoints raise an alert. At the end of the week the whole thing exports as a PDF or Excel report for the client.
What the guard tour system does for you
Not a list of buzzwords — the specific things operators use every shift.
Three kinds of checkpoint
NFC tags for hard proof, QR codes for cheap coverage, GPS points for open ground. Mix all three on the same site.
Read moreScheduled tours
Tell the system a patrol should happen every hour between 22:00 and 06:00. It watches the clock so your supervisor does not have to.
Missed-checkpoint alerts
If a point is skipped or a tour starts late, the office gets an email or push alert while there is still time to do something about it.
Live patrol view
Watch a tour progress in real time — which points are done, which are outstanding, and where the officer is now.
Read moreTamper-resistant records
Each scan carries time, GPS position, device and officer. Records cannot be edited after the fact.
Client-ready reporting
Filter by client, site, guard or date range and export in one click. Schedule the same report to send itself every Monday.
Offline first
Scans are stored on the phone if there is no signal and uploaded the moment there is. Basements and rural sites are not a problem.
Multi-site, multi-client
Unlimited sites and checkpoints on every plan. Add a new contract in ten minutes without ringing us.
Incidents on the same trail
An officer can log an incident with photos mid-patrol, and it lands in the same timeline as the scans.
Read moreWhat changes in the first month
Companies moving off paper or off an older wand system tend to notice the same four things, usually in this order.
- Patrol completion goes up. Officers know the tour is visible, so it gets done.
- Client disputes drop. "Prove it" becomes a two-click export instead of an argument.
- Supervisors stop babysitting. The alerts do the checking; the supervisor handles exceptions.
- Tenders get easier. Being able to show live monitoring and audit trails wins work against companies who cannot.
Choosing a guard tour system: what actually matters
Most guard tour systems on the market do broadly the same job. The differences that bite are practical ones, and they are easy to check before you sign anything.
1. Can a real guard use it at 3am?
Ask to see the guard-side app, not just the manager dashboard. If scanning a checkpoint takes more than two taps, or the buttons are small, adoption will be a fight. Our whole scanning flow is one screen.
2. What happens with no signal?
Plenty of sites have dead spots. A system that silently drops scans offline is worse than paper, because you will not know what you lost. SMS-Patrol queues everything locally and syncs automatically.
3. Is the pricing per guard?
Per-guard pricing punishes you for growing and for seasonal work. A company running 30 officers at £5 each pays £150 a month before extras. Our flat £60 covers up to 40. See the full pricing.
4. Are you locked into their hardware?
Some vendors sell proprietary tags or readers you can only buy from them. Our checkpoints are standard NFC tags and ordinary printed QR codes — buy them from anyone, at pennies each.
5. Can your client see the output without training?
The report is the product, as far as your customer is concerned. If it needs explaining, it is not doing its job. Here is how we compare on the rest.
Guard tour system questions
A guard tour system is software that records where a security officer went, when they got there and how long they stayed. The guard scans a checkpoint — an NFC tag, a QR code or a GPS point — at each location on the route, and the system stores a time-stamped record. It replaces the paper patrol sheet and the wand-and-download systems that came before it.
You place a checkpoint at each place a guard should visit. The guard opens the app, starts their tour and taps or scans each checkpoint as they reach it. Each scan sends the time, the checkpoint and the GPS position to your dashboard in real time. If a checkpoint is missed or a tour is late, the office is alerted automatically.
A guard tour system proves specific points were visited. A guard tracking app shows a live location on a map. SMS-Patrol does both in one system, because in practice you need the map to see what is happening now and the tour record to prove what happened last night.
No. The app runs on any reasonably recent Android phone or iPhone, which almost every officer already carries. There are no wands, no docking stations and no downloading data at the end of a shift.
Yes. You can create GPS-only checkpoints, where the app confirms the officer was physically within a set radius of the point. Many companies start GPS-only and add NFC tags to the sites that need harder proof.
SMS-Patrol is £60 per month for up to 40 guards and £100 per month for up to 100. That is the whole company, not per officer, and every feature is included.