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Camzify
Automated Scheduling

Automated patrol scheduling

Automated patrol scheduling is the ability to configure virtual patrol rounds to run at a defined frequency, during specific active hours, on selected days of the week, completely unattended. The system handles every round, from the first camera to the final report.

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Auto-Patrol settings in the Camzify console: scene observation, schedule frequency, active hours and active days

Frequency

Set how often rounds run: every 30 minutes, every hour, every 2 hours. The system follows the schedule precisely.

Active hours

Define the window when patrols are active. Night-only, business hours or 24/7, matched to your operational needs.

Active days

Select which days of the week the schedule applies. Weekdays only, weekends only, or every day.

Why Scheduling Matters

Why automated scheduling matters

Physical guard rounds depend on someone remembering to run them. A scheduled patrol slips when a site is short-staffed, when other calls take priority, or simply when a written schedule doesn't get checked. The gap in coverage isn't discovered until something goes wrong and nobody can say when the area was last looked at.

Running virtual patrols manually has the same weakness in a different form. Someone still has to log in and start the round at the right time, every time, across every site, which works fine until they don't.

Automated scheduling removes the dependency on memory entirely. Once frequency, active hours, and active days are set, every round fires exactly on time, unattended, whether it's 3am on a Tuesday or a day nobody happened to be tracking.

How It Runs

What happens during an auto-patrol

  • 01Schedule triggers at the configured time
  • 02System steps through each camera in the patrol sequence
  • 03Each checklist item is auto-evaluated
  • 04Non-compliant items notify the assigned guard automatically — no operator has to approve the message
  • 05Safety and security risks spotted at a stop raise a critical notification, whether or not a checklist item covered them
  • 06PDF report is emailed to designated recipients
  • 07Round is logged with compliance percentage
The Auto-Patrol panel with its schedule and reporting options
Auto-Patrol settings as they appear in the console: frequency, active hours, active days and reporting.
Configuration

Scene observation: judging on more than one frame

An automated round can judge a camera from a short window of live video rather than a single still frame. Scene observation watches the feed for one, two or three seconds before deciding. A single frame is enough to tell whether a shutter is down, but not whether a person in view is walking through or loitering — the kind of check that needs a moment of context to call correctly.

Single frame is the faster of the two and the right choice for anything static: a gate, a barrier, a roller door. Watching costs a little more time per stop and earns it back on anything involving people, where the question is almost never “is someone there” but “is someone still there”.

Single frame

One snapshot per stop

Corridor camera showing a person mid-corridor00:00

Someone is in the corridor. Passing through, or standing there? One frame cannot tell you, so it either wakes a guard for nothing or lets a real one go.

Watch for a while

A few seconds of live video per stop

Corridor camera showing a person mid-corridor, tracked00:00

Observing the scene before deciding…

Beyond the checklist

Risks nobody thought to put on the list

A checklist can only ask what you thought to ask. An automated round also assesses each stop for safety and security risks in its own right and raises a critical notification when it finds one, whether or not any checklist item covered it. The blocked fire exit, the unattended bag, the smoke, the person somewhere they should not be — these do not need to have been anticipated when the sequence was written.

The point is when the alert arrives. A condition like a propped-open door or an obstructed exit is a risk for a while before it is an incident, and that window is when it is cheap to fix. A round that only answers the questions on the list walks past everything else; this one flags it while it is still just a condition.

Both assessments are written into the report at every stop, not only when something is found. Alongside them each camera records a plain-language description of the scene, the number of people present, and the objects detected in view — so a risk entry can be read against what the camera was actually looking at.

More on what this covers and where it fits: AI risk detection on patrol. These arrive as critical notifications, in the same queue as AI detections from continuous monitoring, with the snapshot attached and an acknowledgment expected.

Timezone, holidays & pause/resume

  • • Schedules run in the site's local timezone, not the account default, so multi-region deployments stay accurate
  • • Mark specific dates as exceptions so the schedule skips holidays or closures without being rebuilt
  • • Pause a schedule during maintenance and resume it later with the same frequency, hours, and days intact
  • • The next scheduled run time for each sequence is visible at a glance from the schedule list
After The Round

Recipients and escalation for scheduled rounds

  • • A distribution list per site controls who receives the PDF report the moment a round finishes
  • • Any Not Compliant item still triggers its normal guard notification, scheduled or manual
  • • A skipped or overdue round is flagged in compliance tracking the same way a missed manual round would be
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

No. It works through the checklist, and it also assesses each stop for safety and security risks in its own right, raising a critical notification for anything it finds even where no checklist item covered it. A checklist can only ask what somebody thought to ask when the sequence was written, and the useful things a round finds are often not on it, a blocked exit, an unattended bag, smoke, somebody in a place they should not be.

On an automated round, yes. The notification goes to the guard assigned to that camera as the round runs, with no operator in the loop. That is the point of running it at 3am. On a manual round the operator is already looking at the camera, so the message is offered rather than sent automatically, and they can send it, skip it, or send it later from the same item.

It lets an automated round judge a camera from a short window of live video, one to three seconds, instead of a single still frame. A frame tells you someone is in a corridor; a few seconds tell you whether they walked through or stayed. Single frame is faster and right for static checks like a gate or a roller door; watching is worth the extra seconds anywhere people are involved, because it is what stops a round waking a guard over somebody walking past a camera.

It covers the same sequence with the same checks at the same times, and unlike a physical round it happens at 3am on the fourth night as reliably as the first. What it does not do is intervene. It observes, judges, notifies the responsible guard and files the record, so a person is dispatched to the things that need a person rather than to everything.

No. A patrol sequence runs as one unit, so every camera in it fires together on the same schedule. If two groups of cameras need different frequencies or active hours, split them into separate sequences, each with its own schedule.

The current round finishes its remaining stops before the next scheduled trigger is allowed to start, so rounds don't overlap or stack on top of each other. A tightly spaced frequency should leave enough time for a full round to complete.

Yes. Pausing keeps the frequency, active hours, and active days exactly as configured. No rounds fire while paused, and resuming picks the schedule back up unchanged.

Yes. Specific dates can be marked as exceptions so the schedule skips them without needing to be rebuilt or re-enabled afterward.

Whoever is configured as a recipient for that site. The PDF report is emailed automatically the moment the round finishes, with no manual step required to generate or send it.

Related

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