Out-of-hours door access monitor
Problem
Badge events at every door already flow into the access control system, but nobody watches that feed once the office empties out. A lone night security officer walks a physical round of the building, checks doors are locked, and relies on memory for who is meant to be inside. CCTV footage exists but only gets reviewed after someone raises a question, often days later. A contractor's card used at eleven at night, or a departed staff member's card that was never revoked, produces a log entry that sits unread until an incident forces someone to go looking for it. There is no threshold, no named owner, and no alert between the event happening and someone finding it.
Product idea
A live board for the security office that lists every badge event against a permitted-hours ruleset set per zone and role: a cleaner's card is fine at six in the morning, an office card at midnight is not. Anything outside the ruleset escalates to the named on-call security officer, with a countdown to acknowledgement rather than a message sitting in an inbox. The officer marks each alert resolved with a note, so there is a record of what was checked and what it turned out to be. It does not lock or unlock anything and does not touch the access control system's configuration. It watches the feed and tells a specific person when something in it needs a look.
Who it is for
Head of security, who would sponsor it; safety officers and reception and front-of-house leads who need to know when an after-hours entry needs checking.
Possible first version
A scheduled import of the door event log that most access control systems can already export as a file, a configurable ruleset of permitted hours per zone and role, a live dashboard showing anything outside that ruleset, and email or text message escalation to a named on-call officer with an acknowledgement log. Version one does not connect directly into the access control system itself: the import is a manual or scheduled file drop, not a live feed. If the import itself goes missing, the board says so and escalates that too, rather than going quiet.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Head of security, Safety officer, Reception and front-of-house lead
- Relevant to
- Venue & stadium operator, Professional club, Federation / governing body, Academy & youth
- Systems in play
- Access control and door systems, CCTV and incident systems, HR and contractor records
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have in place before this could even start?
The ruleset needs two things before anything else: a door event export from your access control system (most produce this as a scheduled file, not a live feed for version one) and a plain list of who is allowed where and when, department by department. Reception and HR usually hold the second part between them. There is no need to wait for a full policy rewrite; a rough first pass of permitted hours per zone is enough to start catching genuine outliers, and the ruleset gets refined as false alerts show where it was wrong.
Does this replace our access control system?
No. It has no way to lock, unlock or reconfigure a door, and it never issues or revokes a credential. Those decisions stay with the access control system and whoever administers it. What this adds is a layer that actually watches the event log the system already produces and tells a named person when an event falls outside what should be happening, which is not something most access control systems do well on their own once the office is closed.
Our night security already walks the building. Isn't that enough?
A physical round tells you what is true at the moment someone walks past a door, once or twice a night, across what might be a large site with dozens of doors. It will not catch a badge used in a plant room on the far side of the building between rounds. This is not a replacement for the round; it is coverage for the gaps between them, and for the doors nobody happens to walk past that night.
What happens if the access control system goes down mid-shift?
If the export stops arriving, whether because the access control system is down or the scheduled job failed, the board treats that as its own alert rather than simply going quiet. It shows how long it has been since data last arrived and escalates to the same on-call officer, on the reasoning that a monitor nobody can trust to say so when it stops working is worse than no monitor at all.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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