Dealers, we know your business customers count on you for so many things, most importantly protecting their assets and their property. Often, this includes protection against internal theft as well as ensuring that their businesses are opening and closing when they’re supposed to.
Openings and Closings are a great way to monitor when their staff members are coming and going and whether or not their businesses are opening in a timely manner as well as being able to track when they are arming and disarming their systems.
From data entry, you’ll need to pick Area & Open/Close tab as shown below.
Your next step will be to add the area of open by tapping the plus sign shown below with an arrow.
The fields boxed in below are mandatory fields. The descriptions are whatever makes sense to you, the dealer.
From there, you’ll need to add a schedule by clicking the plus button above the arrow. The boxed information below will be what pops up after you clicked the ‘Add A Schedule’ tab.
This particular box is key when it comes to schedules that your customers what reported to them such as Early or Late Opens/Closes or Failures to Open/Close. The two fields in blue (Schedule # and Description) are MANDATORY. The boxes in tan below will auto-default to these numbers, but are not all mandatory. In fact, if you do not want early closes reported, just clear the box labeled early close event. The sections labeled early/late close/open window is how much of a time window your customers would like before our operators call and report. In the example below, the customer is saying that their staff can key in opening codes no earlier than 10 minutes before their scheduled open time and no later than 10 minutes after. So if they open at 8am, our operators won’t get a signal to call unless someone tries to open the location before 7:50am or after 8:10am. As always, save your work by clicking the button that looks like a floppy disk.
Next, you’ll want to move to the center part of your screen and click the drop down button as shown below. From there, select the appropriate option as it pertains to your customer’s business. Are they open Monday-Friday? All 7 days, only specific ones? The choices are there. You just need to pick it.
After you’ve selected the appropriate days your customer’s business is open you’re going to enter their average hours of opening as well as closing. Some businesses, like bars, don’t close until the following morning. The drop down where it says “Same Day” has the option for “Next Day” with these particular customers in mind. As exampled below, this business is open from 8am until 5pm (and yes, that’s military time).
Once that selection is entered and saved, you will be given the ability to customize hours. So if a business is open 8-5 nearly every day, but closes early on Fridays, it would be adjusted to the appropriate times below. Likewise if one day a week a business opens late and stays open longer, this particular section will allow for it.
If you need to edit these customizable dates to reflect the different open and close windows, you’ll want to click the little door box as seen below and fill in the following pop-up box.
Finally, there’s the last section on the far right listed as Holidays. If your customers know which holidays they will be closed, all they’ll need to do is let you know so that you can add them in this section so our Central Station is not calling to report unnecessary failures to open or close and disrupting your customer’s holiday with their loved ones simply because we were unaware they were taking the holiday.
We truly hope this helps you to better support your customers and gives them (and you) more time and flexibility by minimizing the worry and hassle of incorrectly handling your accounts by enabling you to fine tune your support to exactly their needs.