How a guard tour works
The site is mapped into a route with checkpoints at the places that matter: perimeter corners, fire exits, the generator room, the server room door, the stairwell on each floor. A tour definition fixes the order, the expected time between checkpoints and how often the round must be done, for example every two hours on the night shift. The guard starts the tour, scans each checkpoint in turn, and the system records the timestamp and, with a phone, the GPS location.
Completed tours, missed checkpoints and late scans become the patrol report. Clients read it to confirm the service they are paying for; supervisors use it to catch guards who sit at the gate all night. Our explainer on guard tour patrol systems compares the technology options in detail.
Wand and RFID vs NFC and QR on smartphones
The traditional guard tour system is a rugged wand that reads RFID or iButton tags screwed to walls. Data is downloaded at the end of the shift by docking the wand, so a missed round is discovered hours later. The wand is expensive, needs a spare, and reports nothing about where the guard was between tags.
Smartphone-based systems replace the wand with the guard's own or an agency-issued Android phone. Patrol checkpoints are NFC tags or QR stickers costing a few rupees each; scans upload live over mobile data, so a missed checkpoint triggers an alert to the supervisor within minutes. The trade-off is phone dependence: battery, network and the temptation to photograph the QR code and scan the photo from the guard room, which is why NFC tags or QR codes placed where a photo cannot substitute are preferred.
- Wand plus tags: rugged, offline, delayed reporting, higher hardware cost.
- NFC on phone: tap to scan, hard to fake, needs an NFC-capable phone.
- QR on phone: cheapest, works on any camera phone, needs anti-photo placement and GPS check.
- GPS-only patrol: no tags, but proves only proximity, not presence at the door.
Setting tour rules that hold up
Define tours per shift, not per site: the night round may need 8 checkpoints every 2 hours while the day round needs 4 every 4 hours. Give each checkpoint a tolerance window so a guard delayed by a visitor is not flagged for a 3-minute slip, but a scan an hour late is. Randomise start times within a window on high-risk sites so intruders cannot time the gaps.
Finally, decide what happens on a miss: an alert to the site supervisor, a call to the guard, and a note in the shift report. A tour system that only produces a monthly PDF nobody reads adds cost without security.
A 20,000 sq ft warehouse runs one roving guard on the 20:00–08:00 shift. The tour has 10 NFC checkpoints around the perimeter and inside the dock area, expected to take 25 minutes, repeated every 2 hours: 6 rounds a night, 60 scans. The rule flags any checkpoint not scanned within 15 minutes of its expected time. On a given night the 02:00 round shows 6 of 10 scans; the supervisor gets an alert at 02:40, calls the guard, and the shortfall appears in the morning duty report sent to the client.
Attend Mitra's guard-tour and patrol monitoring uses NFC and QR checkpoints scanned from the guard app, records GPS with each scan, and shows completed, late and missed checkpoints to supervisors live. Patrol history is exported per site for client reporting alongside guard attendance and incident reports.