All companies, business establishments and even your home need security and protectionfrom theft or vandalism. Your employees may lack confidence in leaving belongings in the office if only secured by doors with traditional locks. Doors in offices are commonly left open during working hours providing an “open invitation” for intruders.

Locks and keys allow you to secure your building, but when keys are lost or stolen, the inconvenience and expense of changing locks and re-issuing keys can be considerable. Keys may also be copied, creating even more security risks.

Many companies use access control systems to provide protection against theft and vandalism, but modern access control systems can offer a great deal more and in particular they can be used to support sophisticated time and attendance management.

A good example of this is The Security Technologies Group who developed the Horizon Rota Time & Attendance and Staff Planning System for both the S2 NetBox and KeyScan System VII Access Control systems.

Horizon was developed by Thinking Software in order to provide Access Control systems with Staff-Planning, Time & Attendance, Staff-Rostering, Payroll-Forecasting & Payroll-Linking functionality.

Horizon has been available since 1994, and is compatible with Access Control products sucg as  axton, ACT, Siemens, Honeywell, BSB, TAC, TDSi, Chubb, Cardax, Tyco, BPT, PAC and IET. This new release makes Horizon work alongside both KeyScan and the web-enabled, browser-delivered S2 NetBox systems.

Being fully integrated with an Access Control system enables both systems to share employee data and transactions. This reduces both keyboard entry time and administrative costs, and also minimises spelling mistakes.

Rather than requiring users to install additional expensive clocking terminals, Horizon utilises the existing access control hardware. When employees present their access credential to a premises or area access reader, that transaction is stored within the access control database and is then sent in near-real time to the Horizon database as an “In punch”. Similarly, when the person leaves that premises or area, an “Out punch” is recorded. Once Horizon contains employee clockings, it can manipulate them to produce management reports and payroll information.

Said Denis Kane, Director of STG, “the enhanced level of performance this scalable, flexible and feature rich solution provides enables both existing and new access control users to bridge the gap within existing product offerings.”

Steve Rothkopf, CEO of Thinking Software, said that “We’ve designed Horizon to work seamlessly alongside a variety of Access Control platforms, and we’re particularly proud of the integration we’ve achieved with both the Keyscan and S2 Netbox offerings. Access Control systems contain a huge amount of valuable information, and it’s our goal to help users use this data to cut payroll costs and increase profitability and staff efficiency.”