Start from what you need to see, not a camera count
The wrong way to plan a camera system is to walk the premises counting corners. It produces a large number, a quote to match, and a system that records a great deal without showing anything useful when something happens.
The right way is to start from the incidents the business actually needs to resolve. A retailer wants to see who came in, what happened at the counter and whether stock left the back door. A warehouse wants the loading dock, the yard gate and the high-value cage. A clinic wants the entrance, the reception desk and the drug cupboard. An office wants the door, the reception and the comms room. Each of those is a place, and each place implies a camera with a purpose. The count is what falls out of that list, and it is nearly always smaller and more specific than the corner-counting number.
It also implies a second question: for how long? Retention decides storage, and storage is where camera budgets quietly double. A camera that must show what happened three weeks ago costs more to run than one that only needs to show last night.
The five places almost every business needs covered
Premises differ, but five positions recur so consistently that they are a sensible starting list for any site.
Every entry and exit. The one rule with no real exceptions. Every door people can use to enter or leave the premises gets a camera placed to identify a face, not just to show that a door opened. That includes the fire exit, which is the door nobody watches and the one most often used to walk stock out.
The point of sale or reception. Wherever money or people are handled: the counter, the till, the front desk. This is the position that resolves disputes — a transaction, a complaint, an incident with a customer — and it needs a view of both the person and the transaction.
Stock, back-of-house and cash handling. The store room, the cage, the safe, the drug cupboard, the area where cash is counted. These are the places where the risk is internal as often as external, and the camera’s job is as much deterrent as evidence.
The yard, loading dock and car park. For any premises with an outside area, vehicles and deliveries are where the largest losses and the most dangerous incidents happen. These positions need weather-rated cameras, usually with infrared for night, and often a wider view supplemented by a narrower one on the gate.
The comms room. Rarely on the list and almost always worth adding. The rack holds the network, the phones, the recorder and often the access control — the one cupboard that, if tampered with, takes everything else down including the cameras.
Typical camera counts by premises type
The following ranges are starting points for planning, derived from the five positions above applied to common Melbourne premises. They are not a specification; every site is surveyed before a count is confirmed.
Small office suite, one entrance. Three to four: the entrance for identification, reception or the open-plan area, the back door if there is one, the comms room.
Retail shop. Four to eight: the entrance, the counter and till, the back door and store room, the shop floor for overview, and any external frontage or laneway.
Clinic or allied-health rooms. Four to six: the entrance, reception, the corridor to treatment rooms, the drug or records store, the rear exit. Treatment rooms themselves are not covered.
Hospitality venue. Six to twelve: each entrance, the bar and till, the floor for overview, the kitchen pass, the back door and bin area, the courtyard or outdoor seating, and the cash office.
Warehouse with a yard. Eight to sixteen: the office entrance, the staff entrance, each roller door, the loading dock, the yard gate and yard overview, the high-value cage, the pick-face aisles that matter, and the comms room. Large floor plates push the number up faster than any other premises type.
The pattern across all of them: the count is driven by the number of entries and the number of places where value sits, not by floor area.
Where to mount them: height, light and field of view
Position decides whether a camera is useful, and three things decide position.
Height. A camera mounted too high sees the tops of heads and the brims of caps. For identification at a door, the lens wants to be roughly at head height or a little above, angled slightly down, so a face fills a useful part of the frame. Overview cameras can and should sit higher, where they see more and are harder to interfere with.
Light. Cameras that face a window or a glass door spend the day looking at a silhouette against glare. The fix is to mount so the light is behind the camera or to the side, or to choose a camera with a sensor built to handle backlighting. At night, infrared illumination handles most interior and near-exterior positions; a yard or car park usually needs either a camera with strong infrared range or existing site lighting that stays on.
Field of view. Every lens is a trade-off between how much scene it covers and how much detail it puts on any one part of it. That trade-off is the reason the next section exists.
Overview versus identification: one camera cannot do both
This is the single most common planning mistake, and it produces the most disappointing footage.
A wide-angle camera mounted high in a corner shows the whole shop floor, which feels like good coverage. When an incident happens, the person involved occupies a few dozen pixels, their face is unrecognisable, and the footage proves that something happened without showing who did it.
An identification camera is the opposite: a narrower lens, mounted lower, pointed at a choke point everyone must pass through — the entrance, the counter, the gate. It shows a small area in enough detail to recognise a face or read a number plate.
Most premises need both, in roughly a two-to-one ratio: an overview camera for the area, and identification cameras on the points people and vehicles must pass through. Planning them as separate jobs, rather than expecting one camera to do both, is what makes the difference between footage that resolves an incident and footage that merely records it.
What the count does to storage, PoE and cabling
Every camera on the plan changes three other numbers, and those three numbers are where the real cost lives.
Cabling. Each camera is a cable run from the position back to the switch. On a small office that is trivial. On a warehouse with cameras at the far end of the yard, the runs are long enough to decide where the switching has to live and whether an intermediate cabinet is needed. The cabling has to be planned and installed by an ACMA registered cabler, and the run count should include the positions you expect to fill later, because pulling one extra cable during the installation is cheap and coming back for it is not.
PoE budget. Cameras draw power from the switch, and a switch has a fixed budget to share across everything connected to it — access points, door readers and cameras alike. A camera with infrared illumination and a heater for an outdoor position draws considerably more than a small indoor dome. Sizing the switch for the eventual camera count, at the wattage of the cameras actually chosen, is what prevents the situation where the twelfth camera causes the tenth to reboot.
Storage. Recording storage is the product of camera count, resolution, frame rate, how much movement each camera sees, and how many days must be kept. A camera watching an empty corridor records almost nothing; one over a busy entrance records constantly. The retention decision — commonly somewhere between thirty and ninety days depending on the business, its insurer and how long it takes to discover an incident — should be made before the recorder is chosen, and then the storage sized to it with headroom. UniFi Protect versus a traditional NVR covers what the recorder decision looks like in practice.
Doors change the answer
If the project includes access control — readers on doors, electric strikes, request-to-exit — the camera plan changes in two ways.
First, every controlled door is by definition a choke point, and it is worth an identification camera so that a door event in the access log can be matched to a face in the footage. Second, the reader and the camera share the same cabling and the same PoE switch, so planning them together is considerably cheaper than cabling for one and returning for the other. UniFi Access covers what a door involves beyond the reader; for planning purposes, add one camera per controlled door to the count.
Places you should not point a camera
Coverage has a boundary, and it is set by obligations rather than by the lens.
Cameras do not go in toilets, change rooms, staff rest areas, or consulting and treatment rooms — anywhere a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. They should not take in a neighbouring property or a public footpath beyond what is incidental to covering your own entrance. Footage of people is personal information, and the Privacy Act obligations that follow — signage telling people they are being recorded, restricting who can view recordings, a retention period that is actually enforced, and a written policy — are part of the installation rather than something to settle afterwards. Worth checking with a legal adviser for the specific business, particularly where staff are recorded in the course of their work.
A camera pointed somewhere it should not be is a liability, not coverage. Planning where cameras do not go is as much part of the count as planning where they do.
A planning checklist before you ask for a quote
Walk the premises with this list, and the quote you get will describe a system rather than a number of cameras.
- List the incidents the business actually needs to resolve, and the place each one happens.
- Mark every entry and exit, including fire exits and roller doors. Each gets an identification camera.
- Mark the point of sale or reception, the stock and cash areas, and the comms room.
- Mark the yard, dock and car park, and note whether site lighting stays on at night.
- Decide the retention period with the insurer and the business’s own needs in mind.
- Mark the positions you expect to add later, so the cabling and switch are sized for them.
- List the doors that will have access control; each is another identification position.
- Mark the places a camera must not point.
- Note where the recorder and switch will live, and whether that cupboard is itself covered.
With that in hand, the security systems and cameras survey confirms positions, chooses cameras for each, and turns the list into a cabling plan, a PoE budget and a storage size — which is what the quote should actually be for.