See every officer on a map, live
GPS tracking built for security work: who is on site, who is late, where they walked, and an alert the moment somebody stops reporting.
Stop ringing round to find out who turned up
The most expensive half hour in a security office is the one spent phoning guards to confirm they are where the rota says they are. A live map answers that in a glance — and answers it for every site at once.
- Live positions for every clocked-on officer, refreshed continuously.
- Arrival and departure times recorded automatically against the shift.
- Route replay so you can see the path walked or driven on any past shift.
- Geofence alerts if an officer leaves the site they are booked on to.
- Signal-loss flags when a phone stops reporting mid-shift.
- Mobile patrol support for officers covering multiple sites in a vehicle.
Tracking that is useful, not just impressive
A dot on a map is easy. Turning it into something the control room can act on is the actual work.
One map, every site
All your officers on a single view. Zoom into a site or filter to one client without losing the overall picture.
Attendance without phone calls
Clock-on and clock-off are logged with time and position, so late starts and early finishes are visible the same day.
Route replay
Scrub through a shift and watch where the officer went, with checkpoint scans marked along the trail.
Off-site alerts
Set a boundary per site. If a guard leaves it during a booked shift, the office gets told.
SOS from the same screen
The panic button sends the officer's live position straight to the control room.
Read moreEvidence for clients
Export the location history alongside patrol reports when a customer wants to see coverage proven.
Doing guard tracking properly (and legally)
Tracking staff is sensitive, and doing it badly creates more problems than it solves. Three rules keep it straightforward.
Track the shift, not the person
SMS-Patrol only records location while an officer is clocked on. When the shift ends, tracking stops. Nothing is collected on their own time, which removes the single biggest objection guards raise.
Tell people, in writing, before you start
Under UK GDPR you need a lawful basis and transparency. In practice that means a short paragraph in the staff handbook and a line in your privacy notice explaining what is tracked, why, and how long it is kept. Ask us on the demo and we will send you sample wording.
Keep it proportionate
Collect what you need to run the operation — attendance, patrol coverage, safety — and no more. Retention is configurable, so you are not sitting on years of location data you have no reason to keep.
Tracking is one part of the job
The map tells you where. The rest of SMS-Patrol tells you what happened and turns it into paperwork.
Patrol proof
NFC and QR checkpoint scans prove indoor presence where GPS cannot.
Rotas
The shift the officer is tracked against comes from the same schedule you built.
Incidents
Reports filed on shift attach to the same timeline and location trail.
Invoicing
Verified hours on site become the timesheet and then the client invoice.
Guard tracking questions
The guard app reports its position while the officer is clocked on to a shift. Those positions appear on your dashboard as a live marker and are stored as a breadcrumb trail you can replay afterwards. Tracking runs only during a booked shift — not on the officer's own time.
Tracking staff during working hours is lawful in the UK provided you have a legitimate business reason, you tell staff clearly what is collected, and you only collect what you need. Because SMS-Patrol tracks solely during clocked-on shifts and stores nothing outside them, it fits the proportionality test comfortably. We can supply wording for your staff handbook and privacy notice.
It uses a low-frequency location mode designed for long shifts rather than continuous high-accuracy polling. A typical modern phone comfortably covers a 12-hour shift. Officers on very long shifts usually keep a cheap power bank in the van anyway.
You will see it. The dashboard flags officers whose location has stopped reporting during a shift, so a lost signal or a disabled permission is visible immediately rather than discovered a week later.
Yes. Every shift stores a full location history that you can replay on a map, alongside every checkpoint scan and incident report from that shift.
GPS is weaker indoors, which is exactly why the system pairs it with NFC and QR checkpoints. Inside a building the tag scan is the proof of presence; outdoors the GPS trail does the work.