Belfry vs TeamMap: back office or live shift

Belfry and TeamMap both sell to guard companies that have outgrown a spreadsheet. They are not built around the same problem. Belfry is a back-office platform that reaches into the field. TeamMap is a field platform that reports to the office.

What each one is actually built around

Belfry's site puts scheduling, payroll, field activity and billing on one platform, and points the product at security companies with 10 or more officers. Read the module list and the shape is obvious: Scheduling, Timekeeping, Operations, Payroll and HR, Billing. Labor is the biggest line in a guard contract, so Belfry went after the systems that price it, pay it and bill it.

TeamMap starts at the other end. The premise is that the guard on post and the dispatcher watching the map are working from different information, and the record of what happened ends up scattered across paper logs, texts and three apps. So the map, the patrol record, the incident, the report and the conversation sit in one place, on one screen, in real time.

Both premises are right about something. The question is which one describes your bad week.

Feature by feature, from each vendor's own pages

Category	Belfry, per Belfry's site	TeamMap
Scheduling	Best-fit officer suggestions filtered by certification, site experience and overtime status; unbilled overtime calculated live as you build the schedule	Drag-and-drop calendar, open shifts a guard can claim, GPS-stamped clock in and out, no-show alerts, timesheet export to CSV
Payroll	Direct deposit, tax filing on the platform, automatic overtime and post-specific wage calculation, compliance across states	None. Export the hours and run payroll elsewhere
Billing	Create, send and track invoices, with ACH and credit card processing	None
Patrol verification	Recurring NFC and geofence checkpoint tours, checkpoint scans by GPS, NFC or geofence	Checkpoints verified by NFC tag or QR code, every scan GPS-stamped, missed and late checkpoint alerts
Live field view	Track live officer locations	Live map carrying guards, incidents, tasks and geofences together
Communication	Two-way messaging; real-time alerts on anomalies	Team channels, direct messages, voice notes, photos
Guard safety	Not named on the operations page. Ask in the demo	SOS button that sends position and incident to the team, lone-worker welfare check-ins that escalate when missed
Client reporting	Real-time client portals, custom reporting, incident reports	No client portal. Reports and incidents export to PDF, analytics to PDF or CSV
Offline	Not named on the operations page. Ask in the demo	Checkpoint scans, reports, incidents, clock-ins and photos queue on the phone and send when signal returns
Pricing	Per employee per month, billed on active employees, quoted on request. No public figure	Free plan, then Pro and Business priced per user and published on the site

Two rows say "not named". That is not a claim the feature is missing. It means Belfry does not name it on the pages we read, so neither should we.

What Belfry does that TeamMap does not

It prices the schedule before you publish it

Belfry's scheduling page states that it calculates unbilled overtime in real time as you build your schedule, and that the moment an assignment puts someone over 40 hours you see it. Click an open shift and it surfaces officers who are certified, site-experienced, not on overtime, sorted by pay rate.

TeamMap's calendar is fast to work in. Drag a shift to move it, drag its edge to change its length, drag an empty slot to create one. What it does not do is put a dollar figure on next week before you publish it.

On a contract running single-digit margins, that gap is the whole argument. If you have not costed your own leak yet, the arithmetic is laid out in how companies actually cut overtime cost.

It pays and it bills

Belfry runs direct deposit and tax filing on the platform, calculates overtime and post-specific wages automatically, and creates, sends and tracks invoices with ACH and card processing.

TeamMap does none of that. Hours come out, and something else pays them and bills them. So if your stack today is a scheduling tool plus a payroll bureau plus QuickBooks plus a patrol app, Belfry collapses more of it. The finance half is worth thinking through on its own terms, in running the books in QuickBooks and getting invoices out and paid on time.

What TeamMap does that Belfry does not publish

Lone-worker safety as a built feature

SOS sends the guard's position and an incident to the team by push and email, and keeps reminding until somebody responds. Welfare check-ins prompt on a timer during a lone-worker shift and escalate when the prompt goes unanswered.

Fire watch. A construction site at 3am. A rural property. Parking enforcement. If that is your book, this is a category you buy for, not a box you tick. How often to prompt and what to do when nobody answers is covered in running welfare checks for lone workers.

Belfry's operations page does not name a panic button or a lone-worker feature. Ask them directly rather than assuming either way.

One map instead of one schedule

Belfry shows live officer locations and a shift drilldown. TeamMap's dispatcher screen puts guards, open incidents, assigned tasks and geofence boundaries on the same map, so "who is closest and free" is answered by looking instead of by cross-referencing.

The difference shows up mid-shift. A report comes in from the field, the dispatcher sees who is nearest, and the task goes out without changing screens. If that is the workflow you are shopping for, sending a guard in three steps walks the whole loop, and geofencing without the false alarms covers the part that goes wrong first.

Structured incidents, and a record that survives no signal

TeamMap incidents run on templates by type, carry photos, get assigned to a person or a group, raise an alert when the response-time target is missed, and hold a timeline you can export to PDF.

When the phone drops signal, the checkpoint scan, the report and the photos queue on the device and send themselves later. In a stairwell or a basement plant room that matters more than any feature list suggests. Belfry publishes custom reporting and client portals but does not publish an offline mode. Test that one in a demo, in airplane mode.

Which one should you buy?

Can you run both?

You can. Belfry for the office, TeamMap for the field. You would be paying twice, training twice, and reconciling two records of the same shift by hand, because nothing connects them.

Under a hundred guards that is rarely worth it. Pick the one that addresses what is costing you money this quarter, and be honest about which that is. If you are still early, choosing a mobile patrol app lists the questions worth putting to any vendor, and the wider field of guard management tools covers who else is in the room.