Post Orders Explained: What Your Security Guards Should Be Told to Do

They exist so nothing depends on one person’s memory

Post orders are the written record of what an officer is supposed to do at a specific post, and the reason they exist is simple: a property changes officers over time, through rotation, sick days and turnover, and whatever a good officer carries in their head walks out the door with them. Written orders mean the next officer, who has never seen the property before, can work the post correctly on the first night rather than learning it by trial. A property manager who has never read the post orders for their own site is trusting an unwritten agreement that nobody can actually check.

They come from a walk-through, not a template

A supervisor walks the property with the manager or whoever knows it best, before the first shift, and the orders are written from what that walk turns up. That is what separates real post orders from a generic document: the pool gate named is the one that sticks at Building 7, the contractor allowed on the roof after hours is named specifically, the tow policy states the community’s own third-notice rule rather than a placeholder. Nothing in a good set of orders could apply equally to any other property, because the walk-through is where the property’s own facts get written down. If your orders read like they could belong to any community in town, they were not built from a walk-through, or the walk-through was too quick.

What belongs in a complete set

A complete set of post orders covers several categories, and a manager reviewing them should expect to see all of it, not just the parts that got attention.

Section	What it covers
Property and contacts	Address, post type and hours, day and after-hours contacts for the client and for dispatch
Duties by time	What the officer does at the start of shift, through the night, and at the end, in order
Access rules	Who counts as a resident, tenant or approved contractor, and how each is handled
Patrol route and checkpoints	The specific stops, what is checked at each, and the interval between rounds
Incident procedures	Who is called first for a medical emergency, a fire, a crime, a disturbance, in that order
Reporting requirements	What goes in the daily activity report, when it is sent, and to whom
Site-specific instructions	Whatever belongs only to this property: the resident who needs a welfare check, the gate that sticks, an event calendar

Any of these missing is a gap an officer will eventually have to fill with a guess, and a guess made at two in the morning is not where you want the property’s policy decided for the first time.

They read specific, not general

The test of a good instruction in post orders is whether an officer who has never set foot on the property could follow it correctly. “Patrol the grounds” is not an instruction; “walk the breezeways of Buildings 1 through 6 and check that secured doors are latched, then drive Lot B and the perimeter fence line, checking lighting” is. “Handle disturbances appropriately” is not an instruction; “make courteous contact, ask for the volume to be lowered, and if it is not, call the manager on duty, and if the person becomes hostile, call police and log the time” is. The vaguer a line reads, the more it is asking the officer to invent the property’s policy in the moment, which is exactly what post orders are meant to prevent.

They change when the property changes

A gate code changes, an amenity’s hours move, a construction phase starts, a new contact takes over for the management office: each of those should trigger an update to the post orders, not wait for a scheduled review. Price Protection dates every version and has officers initial changes so a report from any date can be checked against the orders that were in force that day. A manager who tells dispatch about a change and assumes it reached the officer on post that night is skipping a step; the change belongs in the written orders, signed, before the next shift starts.

What a manager should actually do with them

Read the current set once a quarter at minimum, and any time an incident report raises a question about what the officer was supposed to do. Ask, specifically, whether the orders still match the property: has a new building opened, has an amenity’s schedule changed, has a contractor relationship ended. Bring anything site-specific that has changed to the monthly review rather than waiting for the annual one. Post orders that are read and questioned stay useful; post orders that are signed once and filed away drift out of date without anyone noticing until an incident report shows the gap.

A manager who wants to test a set of orders can do it in ten minutes: pick any hour of the shift and ask what the officer is supposed to be doing then, pick any entrance and ask who is allowed through it and on what proof, and pick any kind of trouble and ask who gets called first. If the answer is in the document and matches how the post actually runs, the orders are current. If the answer comes from memory, or from what the officer on shift happens to do, the orders need attention before the next incident makes the gap obvious.

Where to start

The post orders template lays out every section with the fields to fill in, useful both for preparing for a walk-through and for auditing a set you already have. If your property is still deciding whether it needs coverage at all, the hiring checklist works through that decision first, since post orders only make sense once the posts themselves are defined.