Guard tour system cost: how to compare vendor quotes

Three quotes for a guard tour system land on your desk. One is a bundle price for a handheld reader, a docking station and twenty checkpoints, with a lifetime licence and no monthly fee. One charges per handset per year. The third charges a monthly figure that rises in steps with the number of accounts you open. None of the three tells you what the system costs your business, because none of them is counting the same thing. This article puts them on one denominator.

Vendors label it a guard tour system or a guard patrol system, and neither name tells you how it is billed. Searching for the price does not settle it either. Of six UK vendor pages read in September 2026, several publish no figure at all and route you to a contact form or an 0800 number. Those that do publish quote on entirely different bases: one by handset per year, one in user tiers, one as a one-off bundle price.

In short: COREDINATE, a guard tour system, costs 32 € per device per month on a two-year term or 52 € on a rolling monthly contract, billed in euros and by the device rather than by headcount. Twenty devices come to 640 € a month. The bigger lever on your bill is the billing unit, not the unit price.

What a guard tour system costs per month

A guard tour system is licensed software, billed monthly. What varies between vendors is the unit it counts, and within one vendor, the term. The COREDINATE guard tour system costs 32 € per device per month on a two-year term and 52 € on a rolling monthly contract. A one-off setup fee of 99 € applies when the first app is activated.

The two tariffs differ in contract term and nothing else. Both carry the same 15 core functions, including the daily occurrence book, the lone worker alarm and the reports, so choosing between them is a cash-flow decision rather than a specification one.

Every figure in this article is net of VAT. The subscription is billed in euros, so the sterling amount leaving your account follows the exchange rate on the invoice date. A UK business buying from outside the UK normally receives the invoice without UK VAT and accounts for the tax itself under the reverse charge. Ask your accountant how that sits with your own VAT position.

Four modules can be added to either tariff, and the unit of charge is not the same for all of them.

Three units sit in one small table, and this is where most comparison sums come apart. Tariffs and flexible forms hang on the device, the extended file manager is a flat fee whatever the device count, and the rota module is charged per user, the single exception to the device rule.

Rotas are built in the portal, not on the handset in an officer's pocket, so the charge falls on the people with rota access: schedulers and operations managers, not everyone in the field. A firm running twelve devices and two schedulers pays 8 € a month for duty planning, not 48 €.

Five billing units, one service

UK vendors charge on at least five bases: per device, per handset per year, per user tier, per guard ID, and per site with modules on top. A sixth route is no subscription at all, but a one-off hardware purchase with a lifetime licence. Two quotes with the same headline figure can differ by a factor of three or four.

Head-based models publish a range rather than a rate, and the figure steps up in tiers as accounts are added, so the quote gives no way to read what happens when you cross one. The effect is sharpest in shift work. A contractor covers twelve sites with twelve work handsets and employs 45 people to do it, mostly part-time with seasonal relief. Billed per device, the invoice runs to twelve lines. Billed against the staff list, 45. Same service, nearly four times the chargeable quantity.

The arithmetic reverses, so read every quote both ways. One UK vendor prices in user tiers and puts no limit on devices or QR checkpoints, so a firm that issues each officer a handset and keeps a small, stable payroll pays less there than on a per-device list.

In British guarding the head belongs to the contract rather than to the company. When a client re-tenders a site, the law treats it as one of the service provision changes under TUPE, and the officers assigned there transfer to the incoming contractor on their existing terms. Every win brings accounts you did not recruit, every loss leaves accounts nobody closes, and relief officers reach a staff list long before they reach a rota. A device count moves only when you buy or retire a handset, and when the site goes, the handset goes with it.

The line items that go missing from quotes

The monthly price covers the software licence, and the common ground ends there. Setup, training, support, recording hardware and replacement units sit inside the price at one vendor and in five separate lines at the next. Ask for each as a figure before you compare two quotes.

Who builds the sites, patrols and checkpoints in the system, and at what rate? Most vendors charge the initial build by the hours it takes, so ask for the figure before you sign. Is training included or billed at a day rate? A day rate recurs with every intake, and guarding turnover turns that into a running cost. And what does support mean in this quote? A knowledge base, a ticket queue and a staffed helpline are three services under one word, with a guaranteed response time often a fourth line underneath.

Does the system need its own recording hardware, or does it run on handsets you already have? The NFC tags at the checkpoints are unavoidable in any system and cost very little. A handheld reader is a different order of commitment: the reader, the docking cradle, a licence tied to one computer, and a spare unit at roughly £490 net for the day one fails. A cloud-based guard tour system runs on devices your officers already carry.

Who carries replacement and repair? A failed reader has to be replaced from the same product line, and the site produces no record until it is. A failed smartphone is replaced by any NFC handset in the office.

Finally, is each figure ex VAT or inc VAT, and is every line on the same basis? UK shop pages tend to quote inclusive of the standard rate of VAT (20%) while B2B quotations are written net, and one UK reseller does both on a single product page: the bundle inclusive, the renewal exclusive. Normalise everything to net first, or you will compare a number against the same number plus a fifth.

In COREDINATE, a guard tour system, those answers are: training and the 24/7 help centre inside both tariffs, 99 € once on activation of the first app, and NFC tags your own team fixes in place. Which answers should decide the purchase is a separate question, covered in our guide on how to choose a system.

One-off reader or subscription: the three-year view

Over three years, and on licence price alone, a one-off reader with a lifetime licence is the cheaper of the two if your device count never changes. On a UK reseller's published prices, one robust reader bundle costs £698.15 net across three years against £866.09 for the same vendor's annual handset licence. The argument is about what neither figure contains.

Source: a UK reseller's published prices, read on 15 September 2026 and normalised to net where the page quotes inclusive of VAT. Reader bundle, handset bundle and licence renewal terms.

That gap of £167.94 is thirteen hours of work at the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour. A docking system buys a daily task along with the device: after every shift someone walks the reader to the one machine that can read it, waits for the download and files the result. That happens once per device per shift, and across three years of nightly cover, 1,095 shifts, anything over three quarters of a minute at the dock closes the gap. Take your own minutes, multiply by shifts and devices, divide by 60 and multiply by your hourly cost. No quote contains that line.

Growth costs differently on each side. The lifetime licence covers one computer, so a second office that reads its own devices needs a second licence, and each extra reader is bought outright. On a subscription, growth is one more device line. The battery is the other asymmetry: two to four years of service, then a replacement at the manufacturer, at a price the page does not publish. That is what the spare is for.

Then there is when the evidence arrives. A docked reader produces its record after the shift ends. An online system produces it during the patrol, so a missed checkpoint raises an alert while the officer is on site and the daily occurrence book closes with the handover. That matters where a client pays against proof of attendance, and again at an SIA Approved Contractor Scheme assessment, where an assessor works through company documents, duty rotas and client site lists. The question is how fast you can produce a given night's patrol record, not whether you can produce it eventually.

Tax treats the two routes differently without favouring either. Hardware is capital spending, and most firms can claim capital allowances on IT equipment in the year of purchase through the annual investment allowance. A subscription is a running cost against the same profits. What differs is cash out of the door on day one.

Without converting currencies, the comparable COREDINATE figure is the two-year minimum term: 867 € per device, being 32 € a month across 24 months plus the 99 € setup fee. Ten devices come to 7,779 €. Training, the 24/7 help centre, all 15 core functions and the lone worker alarm sit inside that figure. HSE guidance on protecting lone workers (INDG73) expects employers to keep in touch with officers working alone, so the alarm is not an optional line. Our piece on the lone working risk assessment covers that duty in practice.

What moves the price down

Two levers move a subscription price and both are settled at signing. The contract term is worth 240 € per device per year. The device count is worth more, because it is the quantity everything else is multiplied by, and it is the number most firms get wrong first time.

The term is the smaller lever. Two years takes the price from 52 € to 32 € per device per month, or 2,400 € a year across ten devices. In British guarding a site usually disappears because you lost the re-tender rather than because a season ended, and that date is set by somebody else, which is what the rolling contract is for.

The device count is the larger one. Count devices, not heads. A handset that passes through three shifts and three officers is one line on the invoice, and because each officer signs in with their own credentials, the recorded times stay attributable to the individual, which is what a client audit asks for.

How to size your own requirement

Three inputs settle your own figure: the number of devices in use at the same moment, the contract term, and any modules beyond the core functions. It takes about a quarter of an hour and your site list, and it belongs before the first quote, not after it.

First, count the devices that are out at the same time. Work down the site list and note how many handsets are in use simultaneously, not how many sites you hold. A mobile patrol officer covering eight sites in one round needs one handset, and a double-manned post needs two. Multiply that number by 32 € or 52 €.

Second, match the term to your contract position. Long-standing sites with predictable renewals justify the two-year rate. Project work and seasonal cover belong on the rolling contract, where the 20 € premium per device buys the right to stop when the site does.

Third, price the modules separately, each on its own unit. The 15 core functions already cover patrols, the daily occurrence book, incident reports with photos, time tracking, key management and the lone worker alarm. Add the rota module by the number of schedulers, flexible forms by devices, the file manager as a flat fee. Booking all four at the start pays for functions whose value is not yet established.

One side of the calculation is still missing, and it decides whether any of this is worth buying. Set the monthly figure against the hours that currently go into retyping paper reports, assembling evidence for a client audit and docking readers at the end of each shift. Those hours appear on no quote and are paid at £12.71 an hour or more plus on-costs.

Frequently asked questions about guard tour system cost

Every figure here stands as at September 2026. The binding and current version is on the price page for the guard tour system.

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Work with your own numbers rather than an estimate: run the test kit for 14 days and count how many devices your sites need at once. For a calculation against your own site structure, speak to our sales team.

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