> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://beathantechnologies.com/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What Sentry Does for your company - URL: https://beathantechnologies.com/blog/what-sentry-does/ - Published: 2026-09-17T08:00:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-17T08:00:03.000Z - Description: Most security software is written by people who have never stood at a gate at 3am. Clock-in, panic alerts, welfare checks and the visitor book, and why they belong in one system. - Author: Liam van Huyssteen - Tags: Sentry, Security operations Most security software is written by people who have never stood at a gate at 3am. That sounds like a cheap line, but it shows up in the products. Timesheets designed for office staff who badge in at one building. Incident logs that assume a desk and a stable connection. Visitor books ported straight from a spreadsheet. Then it gets sold to a security company because the category was close enough. We build software in South Africa, and Sentry came out of one specific request. A client running thousands of guards across multiple sites could not answer the simplest question in their business: are my people where they are supposed to be, right now? He had tried what was on the market. None of it fitted how he actually worked. Here is what we ended up building. --- ### Clock-in that survives the real world A guard clocks in against a geofence, using face recognition, an NFC tag, a barcode code or an employee number. The app records where they were and how accurate the fix was, so a disputed shift has an answer rather than an argument. It runs as a native Android app and works offline. That is not a feature we added for the brochure. Coverage at a site is not something you can assume, and a system that only works with signal fails on exactly the shifts you most need recorded. Everything queues on the handset and syncs when there is signal, stamped with the time it actually happened rather than the time it eventually uploaded. ### Selfie Verification Face recognition proves who clocked in. The other methods do not: an NFC tag, a barcode or an employee number proves only that somebody had the tag or knew the number. So for those methods you can require a selfie. The guard photographs themselves before the clock-in completes, and the photo appears in the Photo column on the Timesheets page. It is a check against buddy clocking, where one guard clocks in for a colleague who is scheduled but not there. Selfies are deleted automatically. The default is 120 days, and you can set your own period per company, which matters for POPIA: keeping staff photographs indefinitely because nobody chose a number is exactly the kind of thing an audit finds. ### Scheduling your staff Rostering happens in the web portal, so it is not a separate subscription and a separate login. Schedule an individual guard or a whole site, by day, week or month. If you already run EasyRoster there is an import tab, so the schedule you have built comes across rather than being retyped. Retyping a roster is both an afternoon and a source of errors nobody notices until payroll. --- ### Employee Welfare **The panic button** Every screen in the guard app carries an SOS button. Press it, and the control room gets a notification, a webhook and a WhatsApp message with the site and a location fix. If the handset had no signal when the button was pressed, the alert queues and sends later, stamped with the moment of the press. The control room sees both times and a line saying it arrived late, so a two-hour-old emergency never looks like a fresh one. **Welfare checks for people working alone** A guard on a quiet site by themselves is the situation most likely to go unnoticed. Sentry prompts them on a schedule. The handset wakes, even locked and dark, and rings until it is answered. The guard confirms they are fine, answers a small arithmetic question so a pocket cannot answer for them, and identifies themselves. If nobody responds before the timer runs out, it is recorded as missed and the control room is told. The check and the answer are logged with a location fix. Over a month that becomes evidence you were managing lone worker risk, rather than a claim you were. --- ### Visitors, without a paper book full of ID numbers The visitor book is the most neglected part of most security operations and increasingly the most legally exposed. Sentry logs visitors in and out at the gate, with ID documents, passports and driver's licences scanned rather than copied out by hand. Vehicles are recorded with their disc details, and dwell time is tracked so you can see who came in this morning and never left. Expected visitors can be registered in advance, so a contractor arriving at 6am is not a negotiation. The POPIA angle matters here. A paper book sitting in a guard hut, holding hundreds of ID numbers in plain sight, is a compliance problem waiting to be noticed. Digital records can be access controlled, masked in exports, and retained on a schedule. **Everything else, and why it is one system** Digital occurrence book. Scheduling and standby rosters. Shift handovers. Leave management. Pay rates and automated invoicing. Asset and compliance document tracking, including firearm competency and PSIRA registrations with expiry dates. A client portal so your customer can see their own sites. Full audit logs. The thing that makes it work is that it is one system rather than modules bolted together. A guard's GPS position feeds the timesheet. The timesheet feeds the invoice. The occurrence book feeds the client report. You enter something once and it appears everywhere it should, which is the whole difference between software that reduces admin and software that moves it around. --- ### Visitors, without a paper book full of ID numbers Who this is for Security companies and control rooms, from independents running a few dozen guards to operations across many sites. Corporates running security in house, who want the oversight without an enterprise budget. Smaller firms who want to compete on accountability rather than price. It is built and supported in South Africa, with an architecture meant to serve operators in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. Fragmented systems and accountability gaps look much the same wherever guards are deployed. --- **What comes next** Over the coming weeks we will go through each of these properly. One post per area, covering the problem it exists to solve rather than the features it ships with. The panic pipeline, what offline actually means, how compliance tracking stops being a spreadsheet. If you run a security company and any of the above sounded like your Monday, get in touch. [Contact us ](https://beathantechnologies.com/contact?ref=beathantechnologies.com)