Daily activity report (DAR): Definition and What It Means for Your Property

The report is the product

A guard company sells hours of attention, and the DAR is the only proof of how those hours were spent. A manager who reads it on Monday morning can see that the pool gate was locked at 10:05 on Saturday, that a white pickup circled the north lot twice at 2:40, and that the maintenance door on Building 7 was found propped and closed on three separate rounds. None of that is dramatic. All of it is useful, because patterns show up in a week of DARs long before they show up as an incident.

Price Protection sends a written report to every client every day. Officer performance is also reviewed daily against that report, so an officer who skips a round or writes “all quiet” for a shift that plainly was not is caught by the supervisor before the client notices.

What a good DAR contains

Entries are timed and factual. “2:40 a.m. White Ford F-150, no plate visible, circled north lot twice, left via Main St. exit” is an entry. “Suspicious vehicle” is not. Each round is listed with the checkpoints it covered, each visitor and contractor with the name, company and the unit or area they went to, each maintenance issue with the location, and each contact with a resident, employee or member of the public with what was said. The last entry is the handover: what the next officer needs to know, and the name of the officer who took the post.

DAR versus incident report

The DAR records the shift. An incident report records one event in enough detail to support an insurance claim, a trespass notice or a police report. When something happens, the DAR gets a one-line entry and a separate incident report gets the full account. The daily activity report template shows the layout we use on post.