In this guide 6 sections
Make the vendor run your own messy month: a roster with relievers and double shifts, a muster with disputed days, uniform recovery on wages, and an invoice per post. Software that copes with all four, without a side spreadsheet, has earned a second meeting with your accounts clerk and field officer. Use your own data.
Can it build a roster around posts, not just people?
A guard force is organised by post. Each gate, watch tower or reception desk needs a sanctioned number of guards on every shift, and the client pays for exactly that number. Ask the vendor to open one post.
Then remove a guard. Does the screen flag the gap, offer a reliever from the reserve bench, and keep the cost of the covered post apart from the guard’s home post? Many tools just list names against dates.
Test the awkward patterns too, such as a night shift crossing midnight, a rotating weekly off, and one guard covering two posts in the same week. Watch the screen, not the slides.
- Sanctioned strength against deployed strength, per post and shift
- Reliever and reserve pool with a clear status
- Night shifts that cross midnight
- Transfer history for every guard
- A live view of posts running short today
How does it capture muster, and what happens when it is disputed?
Muster drives both wages and billing. Ask how a field officer marks it, whether by phone app at the post, a call to the control room or a paper sheet keyed in days later. Each fails differently when the signal drops. Ask for the failure case.
Now stage a dispute, in which the client says the night guard at gate two was absent on the ninth and wants the day struck off the invoice. Can you pull the officer’s mark, the time it was made, the device it came from and every edit made afterwards, with the name of whoever changed it?
An overwritable muster is useless here. Vague answers mean a thin trail.
Does it follow your wage rules and recoveries?
Guard wages are rarely one number. There is a basic rate, allowances, double-shift overtime and weekly off pay, and then come statutory contributions and recoveries for uniform sets, shoes or a salary advance. Rates can differ by site.
Ask the vendor to load two guards on different pay structures, one on a monthly rate and one on a daily rate, and print a payslip for each. Then check that statutory contributions follow your country’s current rules, that a named person owns every rate update, and that the payslip shows each recovery line by line. Skip promises of later customisation.
Ask for today’s wage register, printed.
- Overtime and double-shift rules set per site
- Uniform and advance recoveries in instalments
- Payslip and wage register in your regulator’s format
- Bank transfer file for your own bank
- Named owner for statutory rate updates
Will the client invoice match the muster?
Billing is where guard forces lose arguments. A contract may charge per guard per shift, per post per month, or at a fixed rate less deductions for absent days. Which of these runs without manual edits?
Then ask for the backup pack. Each invoice should open into the muster that produced it, post by post, because a client who can see the days is slower to dispute them.
Last, test a short-staffed post, because the way the system treats the gap between contracted and deployed guards shows whether the vendor understands your margin. It bills, credits or hides the shortfall.
What do you get on day one and in month three?
Ask for a pilot on two posts across one full month, using your own guards, field officers and accounts clerk, not sample data from the vendor. A demo with tidy data proves little, while a live month brings the late muster, the swapped shift and the guard who quits on the twentieth.
Find out whose property the guard records become, how you export them, and who picks up the phone on the last day of the month. Wages and invoices fall due together then.
Put your questions on one page. Score each answer straight after the demo, while the vendor’s replies are fresh and before a follow-up email softens your memory of the weak ones.
Vendor question sheet for guard-force software
A one-page scoring sheet has five blocks: roster, muster, wages, billing and pilot, each listing four to six questions down the left side. Columns hold the vendor’s answer, a demo mark out of three and a screen note, and a closing row records data export terms and month-end support hours.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Should a small agency ask for a custom build?
Not at first. If you run one or two sites with a simple wage structure, a ready product plus a one-month pilot is usually enough to show whether it fits. Custom work earns its place later, when client contracts bill in ways a ready product cannot handle.
Who should join the vendor demo?
Bring whoever prepares wages, one field officer, the control room supervisor and the person who raises client invoices, since each knows a different way the system can fail. They will ask questions you would not.
Is a phone app for muster necessary?
Not always. Posts without signal, such as a basement car park or a remote warehouse gate, need offline entry that syncs later or a control room that records calls. Ask how the vendor handles that case.
What data should I keep ready for the pilot?
A list of posts with shifts and sanctioned strength, your wage structures, a recent muster sheet, and one client contract that bills in an awkward way. Keep it all in one folder.