Site management
Every site you monitor is a record, not a row. The address and the panels on it, the partitions and the zones inside them, who to call and in what order, when the site is meant to be open, what the operator should do when a signal arrives, who holds a key and where the drawings are — one structure, read by the operator at the desk, the technician in the van and the client on their phone.
One structure
Four levels, and nothing outside them. A desk holds sites, a site holds partitions, a partition holds zones.
Desk
The receiving centre a site reports to. Binding decides which operators ever see the site, and one command binds a whole filtered list at once.
Site
The premises themselves: number, address, district, verbal password, the people responsible for them, the contract behind them and the position they appear at on the map.
Partition
A separately armed part of the site — the shop, the office, the stockroom. Each keeps its own schedule, response groups, keyholders and drawings.
Zone
The detector, the door, the panic button. Named in words rather than by number, typed, linked to the cameras that cover it, and movable between partitions without being re-created.
Schedules, response groups, keyholders, drawings and notification rules attach to one of those levels and apply to everything beneath it. Every level is searchable on its own fields, and a search that returns a set can edit the whole set at once.
What a site record holds
Twelve sections, each one something an operator, an administrator or a technician actually reaches for.
Identification
- Site number
- Partition
- Name
- Address
- District
- Verbal password
- Director
- Responsible person
- Service technician
- Installer
- Position on the map
- Created
Card
Identification, addresses and the people behind the site, plus the contract: number, dates, legal entity, equipment on hire, and whether an arming ban may be enforced against it at all.
Equipment
What is installed and what it can do — panel model and firmware, transmitter, code set, connection date, SIM and network operator, and which paths are live: voice, mobile data, phone line, Wi-Fi or LAN.
Working rules
The partition’s schedule and its exceptions, including automatic arming and disarming and what should happen when the site does not close on time.
Response
Which groups respond, which is primary and which is backup, and the written instruction the operator sees the moment an alarm arrives. A whole set copies or moves to another site rather than being retyped.
Zones
Every zone described in words, typed, flagged where it is a panic button or a patrol-control point, and linked to the cameras that cover it.
Keys
Who holds a key to each partition, copied or moved like everything else, against a central list of keys that must no longer open anything.
Responsible persons
Who to call, in what order, on which number — and what each individual number is allowed to receive.
Plans
Approach routes, alarm layouts and floor drawings, up to six per partition, in front of the operator at the moment the alarm lands rather than in a folder somewhere.
Photos
Up to nine photographs of the site itself, so the crew on the way has seen the entrance before they reach it.
Events
Everything the site has ever sent, filtered by date and time, on the same record as the configuration that produced it.
Forwarding
Who is told what: which recipients, on which channel, for which events, and for which zones.
Services
The subscription behind the record and what it covers, visible where the work is done rather than in a separate billing system.
Onboarding a site
A new site is a wizard, not a form — ten steps in the order the information actually arrives.
Site details
Number, district, address, verbal password, the responsible manager, technician and installer, and the position on the map. Mark here whether it is a fire site, a mobile one, or a test stand that should not reach an operator.
Technical notes
Whatever the next person to attend needs and no field anticipates. It stays with the record.
Panel
Transmitted number, panel type, the test regime the panel is set to, and the entry delay to allow before an opened door counts as an alarm.
Communicator
Pick a free communicator or create one: device type, transmitter, board version, the SIM channels it may use, and a name for every output the desk can switch.
Partition
The first separately armed part of the site. More can follow, and the numbering is kept consistent with what the panel itself reports.
Schedule
Working hours day by day, a free schedule, or round the clock — and whether the partition should arm and disarm on that schedule by itself.
Response groups
Primary and backup, with the instruction the operator reads when the alarm turns out to be real.
Responsible persons
Names, addresses and phone numbers in priority order, each number carrying its own permissions.
Access keys
Who holds a key, per partition, checked against the central list of withdrawn ones.
Zones
Each zone named and typed, and marked where it is a panic button or the point the patrol check watches.
Every step stays editable afterwards by the same route, so nothing has to be right the first time. A site deleted by mistake goes to a bin with the date it was removed, and comes back under any number you choose.
Time is part of the record
A schedule here is not a formality. It decides whether an opening was expected and whether the patrol check runs tonight.
- Monday08:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday08:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday08:00 – 17:00
- Thursday08:00 – 17:00
- Friday08:00 – 17:00
- SaturdayClosed
- SundayClosed
OpenPatrol control
Individual schedule
Hours set for each weekday, with Monday copied down the rest of the week in one action.
Free schedule
For premises with no working day at all — an apartment, a garage, a lock-up.
Round the clock
Always armed, and expected to stay that way.
Arm and disarm on schedule
The partition follows its own hours without anyone touching a keypad, on the panel families that support it.
Patrol control
Outside working hours the system watches a designated zone for a restore at a set interval. A restore that arrives on time is logged as normal, a late one raises a patrol-control event, and silence where a check should have been raises a violation. The schedule is what tells it when to start watching.
Reaching the right person
A phone number is not a contact. Every number carries its own permissions.
| Number | Fire | SMS | Panel control | Mobile app | Voice call | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priority 1 — mobile | Enabled | Enabled | Enabled | Enabled | Enabled | Enabled |
| Priority 2 — home | Enabled | Not enabled | Not enabled | Not enabled | Enabled | Not enabled |
| Priority 3 — work | Not enabled | Enabled | Not enabled | Not enabled | Not enabled | Enabled |
- The same person can be woken for a fire on one number and left alone for a low battery on another.
- Called in priority order — the lowest number first, and that order is a field rather than a convention somebody remembers.
- A person can belong to one partition or to the whole site, and can be copied or moved to another site without being entered twice.
- Mobile-app access is granted by sending a generated password to the number itself, and the send is recorded in the event archive.
- Removing someone can clear them from one partition, from every partition on the site, or from the shared directory entirely.
Shared across every site
Personnel
Managers, technicians and installers, entered once and referenced by every site they touch.
Response groups
Crews and the hours they cover, assigned to sites rather than duplicated into them.
Event codes
The code sets the panels speak, and the words an operator sees instead of them.
Withdrawn keys
Keys that must no longer open anything, checked centrally rather than site by site.
Online users
Browser access to one site’s events for a client who should see them and nothing else. Nothing to install.
Mobile users
App access, with per-user control over which event types ever reach the phone.
Desks
The receiving centres sites are bound to, local and remote.
Cameras
The IP cameras available to attach to a zone, so a signal can arrive with a picture behind it.
Who is told what
One event, and a separate decision for every person and every system that might need to hear about it.
An event arrives
SMS to the client
To the number on the responsible person, subject to that number’s own permissions.
Email
To the address held against the person, for the events they asked to be told about.
Messenger
The same selection delivered over the messaging app the client already uses.
Mobile app
Straight to the app, with each user able to exclude event types they never want to see.
A remote desk
Onward to another receiving centre over SMS or mobile data, for shared or subcontracted monitoring.
Third-party software
Forwarded under its own number in a standard alarm protocol, so a site can also be watched by a system that is not ours.
- Select by class — alarm, arming, disarming, test, mains, battery, tamper — or by exact event code where a whole class is too broad.
- Narrow it to specific zones, so a client hears about the stockroom door and not the office one.
- A site that is temporarily disabled tells nobody anything, without its rules having to be dismantled and rebuilt afterwards.
- Adding a partition to a site that already forwards events prompts for its rules rather than leaving the new one quietly silent.
The record is also the console
What an operator can send from a site record depends on the device installed and on the rights they hold. This is what the software is able to ask for.
Commands
- Arm
- Arm if conditions allow
- Disarm
- Set arming ban
- Cancel arming ban
- Reset
- Request status report
- Request signal level
- Switch SIM
- Relay on / off
- Output on / off
- Request output state
- Restart modem
- Request a photograph
- Synchronise time
- Bind to desk
- Release
- Block device
- Update firmware
What a status report brings back
- Armed state, per partition
- Alarms currently present
- Zone alarms and faults
- Mains power
- Standby battery
- Link to the main block
- Sounder fault
- Link to the desk
- Signal level
- Tamper state
- Output states
Conditional arming is the one worth knowing about: it checks for zone faults, tamper and power problems first, arms only if there are none, and reports back either way. Unconditional arming does what it is told and lets the panel raise the alarm afterwards.
Binding is a security measure with teeth. A bound panel answers only to the desk that bound it, and releasing it is a deliberate act — so a panel whose site record is deleted while it is still bound cannot be recovered by anyone, ourselves included. We would rather say that here than after it happens.
Kept honest
Who changed what, which records are incomplete, what the service costs, and what is still waiting to go out.
Edit history
The date a record last changed, the user who changed it, and the machine they did it from.
Alarm analysis
A month laid out day by day per site, so a run of problems reads as a pattern rather than as a series of unrelated calls — and points at the installation or the antenna rather than at the customer.
Charts and statistics
Unrecognised codes, panel faults, arming counts, restarts and dispatch volumes; totals by district, by network operator and by channel.
Completeness checks
Which partitions are still missing their drawings, found before the night an operator needs one.
Logs
Response-group dispatches, fire and system events, including message-sending history, site deletions and camera changes.
Queue and cost
What is waiting to be sent, with the ability to drop what is no longer worth sending, and cost per site against a rate per monitored hour.
What it is for
Onboard a site once
Everything the desk, the technician and the client need is entered in one pass, and never re-keyed into a second system that will disagree with the first.
Give the operator the answer
Instruction, keyholders, drawings and history arrive with the alarm rather than sitting two applications away from it.
Change a hundred sites like one
Filter to the set, edit the field, and keep the query — so next quarter’s change is the same three steps rather than the same hundred.
Leave a trail
Every change attributed, every deletion recoverable, and every gap in the data visible before it is the reason something went wrong.
Bring us the data you already have
Most operations arrive with sites spread across a legacy database, a spreadsheet of keyholders and a folder of drawings nobody has opened in years. Tell us what you hold and what state it is in. We will tell you what maps across cleanly, what has to be decided rather than migrated, and how long the move actually takes.
Talk to us