Why Access Control Belongs Inside Your Building Management Platform
In most apartment buildings, access control lives on an island. The access system has its own user list, maintained by hand, drifting further from reality with every move-in, move-out and tenancy change. Cards issued to residents who left years ago still open the garage. New residents wait days for a fob. Nobody can say with confidence who can open which door — and when an owner asks, the answer lives in a different system to everything else about the building.
TowerDesk closes that gap with a native integration to Avigilon Alta access control. Your resident directory — the list you already keep accurate, because levies, notices and tickets depend on it — becomes the source of truth for building access. Create a resident and their access follows automatically. Suspend a resident, or process their move-out, and their access is suspended the same minute: never deleted, always auditable.
What the Access Control Integration Does
Automatic Resident Sync
Residents sync to Avigilon Alta automatically — no double entry, no drift. Re-runs never create duplicates, and every change is logged in the building activity log.
Cards, Fobs & Plate Credentials
Issue and revoke access cards, fobs and licence-plate credentials directly from a resident’s profile. Revoking a credential takes one click and is recorded against the operator’s name.
Door Swipe History
Every entry event is recorded against the resident — including denied attempts, flagged in red. Managers see access activity in the same profile as tickets, vehicles and levies.
Vehicle Entry & Exit History
Licence-plate reads at your vehicle gates build an entry/exit history per resident, with a live on-site / away presence indicator — useful for parcels, emergencies and disputes about car park use.
Time-Limited Visitor Plate Passes
When a visitor with a vehicle rego is checked in, a plate credential is issued automatically and revoked on check-out — with an expiry sweep so no pass outlives its welcome.
Remote Unlock
Administrators can remotely unlock an entry for a set window — 2 to 30 minutes — for deliveries or trades, then revert to schedule. Every unlock is logged with who did it and why it matters.
Privacy, By Design
Access records are personal information, and TowerDesk treats them that way. Movement history is visible to managers only — residents cannot see each other’s comings and goings — and events are automatically pruned after 180 days. Suspending access never deletes the underlying record, so the audit trail survives. All of it sits behind TowerDesk’s role-based permissions, two-factor authentication and per-building isolated tenancy, on Australian infrastructure, handled in line with the Privacy Act 1988.
How It Fits the Rest of the Platform
Because access control is a module inside TowerDesk rather than a separate product, it composes with everything else: visitor management issues the plate passes, the resident profile shows swipes next to tickets and vehicles, the activity log captures every credential change, and role-based permissions decide who can operate it. It’s the same story as the rest of the platform’s building management tools — one system, one login, one source of truth. See the full module list on the features overview.