A break-in, reported the next afternoon
At 3am a guard at a retail park finds a smashed window at one of the units. He calls the control room, who call the police and the keyholder. The guard writes notes on the back of a patrol sheet. At the end of his shift he texts the supervisor a summary: 'window smashed unit 4, police came, keyholder attended 4.15, all secure'.
The supervisor writes a proper report the next morning between other jobs, from the text and a phone call with the guard, who is now asleep. The report goes to the client in the afternoon. The client's regional manager wants to know what time the guard last patrolled past unit 4, the police reference, whether there was CCTV, and why she heard about it from the store manager before your company told her.
Why incident reports are slow and thin
Guards are good at dealing with incidents and less comfortable writing about them, especially at the end of a long night. Nothing prompts them for the details that matter, and those details fade fast. The supervisor's rewrite adds time and loses first-hand detail.
- No structured questions, so key facts such as times, references and names are missed.
- Photos stay on the guard's phone or are never taken.
- Reports are written after the shift from memory.
- Supervisors retype into a Word template, adding delay.
- Each supervisor's report looks different, which clients notice.
What weak reporting costs
Clients judge a guarding company heavily on how it handles incidents, and the report is the part they see. Late or vague reports make a well-handled incident look badly handled. Insurers, the police and the client's own investigators may later need exact times and details that were never captured. Supervisors lose hours to rewriting. And your own records cannot show patterns, such as repeated incidents at one unit, because every report is a free-text document.
What must be reported to whom, and when, is set by your contracts and your company's procedures. We build the reporting around them.
Incident reporting from the guard's phone
- Incident types are set up to match your procedures: break-in, damage, trespass, theft, fire alarm, medical, aggressive behaviour, suspicious activity and any others your contracts use.
- The guard starts a report on their phone during or straight after the incident. The form asks questions for that type: times, location on site, people involved, police attended and reference, keyholder called, actions taken.
- Photos and short videos are added within the form, stamped with time and site.
- Last patrol times and checkpoint scans near the location are attached automatically if your patrol system provides them.
- The control room's actions, such as calls made, are added to the same report.
- The supervisor gets an alert, reviews the report, asks the guard for clarification if needed, and approves it. A summary for the client can be written with an AI model such as Anthropic Claude from the approved facts, and the supervisor edits it.
- The approved report goes to the client in your branded format, by email or into their portal.
| Report section | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Timeline | Guard's times, control room log, patrol scans |
| What happened | Guard's account, reviewed by the supervisor |
| Evidence | Photos and video from the guard's phone |
| External references | Police reference, keyholder attended |
| Recommendations | Supervisor, if any |
After the next incident
The guard fills in the form while the police are on site, with photos of the window and the police reference. The control room adds its calls. The supervisor gets an alert, reviews the report at 7am and approves it. The client's regional manager has a clear report in her inbox before the store opens, with the last patrol time and photos. Over the following months, you can see that unit 4 has had three incidents, which is useful at the next security review.
Signs your incident reporting needs work
- Guards report incidents by text or on paper.
- Supervisors rewrite reports the next day.
- Clients hear about incidents before your report arrives.
- Reports lack times, references or photos.
- You cannot easily see incident patterns across sites.