Provident was featured in the Vancouver Sun today in a series of articles on ‘outsourcing your life’.
The article mentions a few of the different homewatch services we offer including filling your fridge with fresh milk, eggs, cheese and juice for your return from vacation, as well as making sure that the dogwalker is actually walking the dog.
Getting to the bottom of the dogwalking issue mentioned in the story was a combination of both our homewatch service and alarm monitoring… and illustrates one of the many benefits of not sharing alarm codes.
Every user of your alarm should be assigned a unique user code to arm/disarm the system. Most alarms, and certainly every system that we have installed in the past five years, are capable of having dozens of different user codes. Just two of the benefits of not sharing codes are that:
- Individual codes allow for restricted access for some users. For example, if you have a cleaning lady who only comes on Wednesdays, we can program her code to only work on Wednesdays between 8:00am and 6:00pm (or whatever hours you’d like); likewise, in a retail store, employees codes can be made to operate the system within reasonable windows of time before and after regular office hours (rather than full 24 hour access).
- Individual codes provide an audit trail. If everyone uses a unique code, we can always look back into the event history of your alarm and tell you that it was Bob who disarmed the system at 6:43am on Tuesday, not Mary.
In the case of the dogwalker mentioned in the article, we were able to review the event history on the client’s alarm and see that rather than seeing the dogwalker disarm & arm the system in the morning and afternoon, she was only arming and disarming once… with only 10 minutes between. Based on this information, we sent one of our Mobile Team members to watch the house at the appropriate time and confirm what we (& the client) suspected… that the dog was not being taken for a hike at all.
In you would like to add, delete or modify any user codes for your alarm, give us a call. We can program almost every single one of our client’s alarms remotely and can help you configure individual codes from our office.
To set-up a homewatch for the next time that you are out of town for the day, weekend or month (or anything in between), call us at 604.664.1087 to arrange for a member of our team to pick up your mail & newspapers, water your plants, check the furnace or whatever else might need to be done. We’ll drive you and the family to the airport, pick you up when you return and make sure that your fridge is full of exactly what you would like to be in it. What can we do for you?