3 Security Problems of Manual Visitor Tracking
Your gatehouse is your gated community’s first line of defense for access to your property. Unfortunately, many communities operate with insufficient and insecure visitor processes that are completely outdated. Whether your gated community has started to digitalize your reception area or still tracks visitors with a pen and paper, there are likely security problems presented by your manual visitor tracking practices.
Granting access without background checks and proper vetting
Employees have known identities within your community and still have to pass through multiple approvals and checks before being granted access to certain areas on your property. But what about guests and visitors who are not known and may pose a security risk? If your visitor tracking is basic and does not include necessary background checks and vetting for guests and visitors, your security is compromised the moment they pull through the gate.
Many visitor tracking solutions can check a walk-in or pre-registered visitor’s information against in-house databases, sex-offender registries, and local and national watch lists. You can also set up these checks to trigger additional tasks, like automatically sending requests to the appropriate resident or personnel for approval or denying the visit if the visitor’s identification matches a high-risk watch list.
Issuing all-access, unrestricted visitor access
Guard houses can be stressful environments. Many communities issue all-access, unrestricted visitor access to alleviate any extra work. This is usually done to make the process easier or save time, or because the community does not have a more advanced solution to grant specific access easily. Unfortunately, this unrestricted access can pose a considerable security risk.
With advanced visitor tracking solutions, you can use electronic ID cards or mobile QR codes that visitors can access from their email and scan at gates throughout your property. This helps you record every area a guest visits and limit their access to unauthorized areas. In addition, their code or ID card will be disabled once their visit has ended, ensuring that access to your property does not fall into the wrong hands.
Limited visitor oversight unnecessary risks
Using a spreadsheet or logbook to track visitor data results in minimal security intelligence and potential undetected risks. Alternative processes to identify these risks are often very limited instead of being a standardized practice. Many communities think that having more comprehensive visitor data insight is only possible with expensive and complicated technologies that are only useful to large communities. Surprisingly, collecting impactful and useable visitor data is available to all organizations with today's extensive range of solutions.
Integrated visitor tracking solutions allow communities to access live dashboards of upcoming and current visitor capacity, entry, location, exit times, and other host and visitor details. As a result, security managers have access to valuable visitor data when they need it and make split-second decisions based on visitor activity.