Venue Capacity Tracking for Security Teams

Your door team is counting people in and out on a clicker, or worse, in their head. Head office finds out the venue was over capacity when the licensing officer calls, not before.

What most firms do today

A hand-tally clicker, a notepad by the door, or a phone calculator. Whoever's counting has to remember the running total across a handover, across a break, across a busy 15 minutes when three groups arrive at once. Nobody off-site can see the number until someone radios it in.

How TacDesk does it

This is occupancy tracking for a venue, not a staffing headcount. If that's what you were looking for, see rota scheduling for who's on shift.

A manager sets a venue's maximum capacity against the site in TacDesk. On shift, guards get a Capacity Tracker widget on their dashboard: two fields, In and Out. Each time someone enters or leaves, the guard logs it. Some venues use a separate counter device or clicker synced to TacDesk instead, so the widget just displays the live count without anyone tapping buttons.

TacDesk keeps a running total for the day: total in minus total out. The widget shows that total against the venue's set maximum as a percentage, and the colour changes as it climbs: green under 80%, amber from 80%, and red at 90% and again at 100% ("at or over capacity"). If the guard's count doesn't match what they can see with their own eyes, they're told to flag it to their manager rather than adjust it themselves, so the record stays honest.

Management gets a Capacity Overview: every enabled venue in one list, current count, set maximum, percentage full, and whether it's filling, steady or emptying, colour-coded the same way. Click into a site and you get a timeline of the day, not just the current number, so you can see when it filled and where the peaks were. A portfolio manager watching six venues on a Saturday night doesn't have to ring each one to know which needs attention.

The same in/out entries roll up into the shift report for that site, so the occupancy record for the day sits alongside the rest of the shift evidence rather than living on a separate clicker nobody kept.

Why it matters

Venues with a premises licence have a legal maximum occupancy, and going over it is a licensing offence. It's also a live safety question: an accurate occupancy figure is what a roll call or an evacuation plan is built on, and it's a documented monitoring point some venues need to show under Martyn's Law. None of that is TacDesk telling you you're compliant. It's a timestamped record of what the door team counted, which is the thing you're otherwise trying to reconstruct after the fact from someone's memory of a busy Saturday.

Where it sits

Capacity Tracking is included on TacStarter and above; it isn't on TacFree. Check pricing for the current plan breakdown, or use the plan finder if you're not sure which plan fits.

It only earns its keep if you actually run venues with an occupancy limit: clubs, events, licensed premises, anywhere a door count matters. If none of your sites have a capacity limit, you won't need it, and that's fine. For patrol evidence rather than door counts, see the guard tour system; for keeping the door team talking to head office day to day, see internal messaging.

Start free on TacFree to try the rest of TacDesk, or book a demo to see Capacity Tracking on a real venue.