TacBot Auto Dispatcher

TacBot Auto Dispatcher attaches the nearest available officers to an incident the moment it is raised at a venue — and their phones tell them straight away. No one has to spot the incident and pick someone; TacBot does it for you, in seconds.

Note: this feature needs both the Dispatcher and Mobile Response features enabled for your account. Without Mobile Response there is no pool of officers for TacBot to draw from.

It runs in two ways: Mobile Auto-Dispatch sends your roving mobile-response officers to any of your sites, while Event Auto-Dispatch pages the on-site team at one specific venue. Each has its own switch in the Dispatcher header, and they can run together.

Who Mobile Auto-Dispatch can attach

For the account-wide Mobile Auto-Dispatch switch, TacBot only ever attaches officers who are:

• on a Mobile Duty — roving officers covering several sites, not standing post at one venue;
• set to Available;
• not already attached to another incident or callout; and
• reporting a recent position from their phone.

A guard standing a contracted post at a site is never a candidate for Mobile Auto-Dispatch. TacBot will not pull someone off a post to send them elsewhere — that job stays covered, and only your roving mobile units are ever considered. Event Auto-Dispatch, covered next, draws from a different pool — the guards clocked in at that venue.

Turning it on

Auto Dispatcher is off by default and has two switches, both in the header of the Dispatcher screen.

Mobile Auto-Dispatch

1. Open the Dispatcher screen.
2. Switch on Mobile Auto-Dispatch in the header.

It is a single switch that covers every site at once — there is no need to set it per venue. Once it is on, an incident raised at any of your sites automatically attaches the nearest available mobile response officers, wherever that incident is. Because the switch affects every site, only an administrator or senior manager can change it; other managers see it but cannot toggle it.

Event Auto-Dispatch

1. Open the Dispatcher screen and pick the venue in the client filter.
2. Switch on Event Auto-Dispatch for that venue.

Unlike Mobile Auto-Dispatch, this is set per venue. Once it is on for a venue, an incident raised there pages the nearest available guards clocked in on-site — and it needs that venue’s Dispatcher Mode switched on first, or there is no live console for it to work from.

If both switches are on for a venue, TacBot considers the on-site guards and the mobile units together and pages whichever 2 are nearest overall — so mobile response acts as backup when no one on-site is closer.

Either way, each site still needs a location on its client profile (see below) — that is how TacBot works out who is nearest.

‘On post’ — protecting your gate staff

At an event, every guard showing Available is a potential responder for Event Auto-Dispatch. If someone is holding a fixed position — a gate, a search point, an entrance — being paged away from it defeats the point of putting them there.

That is what the On post status is for. A guard taps On post on their status pill to tell TacBot they are holding a fixed position, and TacBot skips them when it looks for a responder. Only guards showing Available are ever dispatched, so your gate staff stay exactly where they are meant to be.

On post is self-declared — the guard sets it themselves from their own status pill, the same way they would set Available or Unavailable.

Set the venue’s location

TacBot works out who is nearest using the coordinates on the venue’s client profile — not a live pin, not a guess. If a venue has no coordinates on file, TacBot cannot dispatch anyone to it, and a request from an alarm company for that venue will be rejected outright. It is worth checking the client profile before you switch either toggle on for a site.

How many, and how far

By default, TacBot attaches the nearest 2 qualifying officers or guards within 25 km of the venue. If fewer than 2 qualify, fewer are attached — TacBot never widens the search to find a body. Sending someone from much further away is worse than sending fewer people, so it simply will not do it.

When nobody is available

If no one qualifies, the incident is still raised as normal and appears UNASSIGNED for a human to pick up. A note is added to the incident log explaining why — for example, that every mobile officer was already on another shout, that every on-site guard was set to On post or Unavailable, or that no one had reported a recent position. Auto Dispatcher never blocks an incident from being created; it only ever adds officers to one that already exists.

Alarm companies (API keys)

If an alarm receiving centre monitors one of your sites, you can issue them an API key so their system raises the incident automatically the moment an alarm trips — TacBot then dispatches to it exactly as it would for any other incident.

• Keys can be scoped to a single venue, so a key only ever raises incidents at the site it was issued for.
• A new key is shown once, at creation, and cannot be shown again afterwards — copy it into the alarm company’s system straight away.
• Revoke a key the moment an integration is retired or a monitoring contract ends.
• The last used column tells you whether an integration is still live, which is the easiest way to check before you revoke one.

Related guides

• Dispatcher Dashboard — the live console TacBot Auto Dispatcher builds on, with the switch in its header.
• Mobile response & per-site billing — how to put a site on mobile response and set up mobile duty officers.
• Callouts board and alarm response — the live view of dispatched officers, response times, and SLA countdowns that an auto-dispatched incident feeds into.
• Clients — where a venue’s coordinates are set.