Control every door.
Know every entry.
Card readers, fob systems, and mobile credentials that replace keys entirely. Zone-based permissions, real-time audit logs, and instant revocation — managed from a single dashboard across all your locations.
Keyless Entry Systems
Keys are a liability.
Cards are a system.
Every copied key is an untracked entry point. Every unreturned key from a former employee is an open door. Card access systems eliminate this entirely — with a full log of who went where, and when.
From keys to cards in one week
Access Audit & System Design
We walk your building and map every entry point — main doors, server rooms, parking garages, stairwells. We design zones based on who needs access to what, and when.
Hardware Installation & Enrollment
Our technicians install card readers, electric strikes, mag locks, and controllers. We enroll every employee badge, program access schedules, and test every door before leaving.
Remote Management & Ongoing Support
Add or revoke credentials instantly from a web dashboard. View real-time door status, pull access logs for compliance, and receive alerts for forced entry or propped doors — all included.
Everything in one access plan
Card & Fob Readers
Commercial-grade proximity readers at every entry point. Tap to enter — no keys to copy, lose, or track down from former employees.
Mobile Credentials
Employees unlock doors with their smartphones via Bluetooth or NFC. No physical card needed — ideal for hybrid workplaces and shared spaces.
Zone-Based Permissions
Define exactly who can enter which areas and during what hours. Warehouse staff don't need server room access. Cleaners only need access after 6 PM. Full control.
Full Audit Logs
Every door event is logged — who, when, where, and whether access was granted or denied. Exportable reports for compliance, HR investigations, and insurance claims.
Instant Credential Revocation
Employee leaves or loses their card? Disable it remotely in seconds from the web dashboard. No rekeying, no lock changes, no security gaps.
Camera & Alarm Integration
Access events trigger camera snapshots automatically. A forced door triggers the alarm system. Everything works together — one provider, one dashboard.
Three people call us about doors. Each for a different reason.
Access control almost never gets bought because it's interesting. It gets bought because keys stopped working as a system — too many copies, too many people, or too many questions you can't answer about who was in the building. Here's where our door work actually starts.
The property manager handling tenants and trades
- What brought you here
- A tenant moved out and didn't return all their fobs. The cleaning company changed staff again. A contractor propped the loading door open for three hours on a Saturday and nobody knew until Monday. You're being asked for a key you can't account for.
- What you're actually worried about
- That a common door in your building is effectively unlocked to a list of people you no longer control, and that the first time you find out will be after something happens in a tenant's unit.
We set up multi-tenant buildings so each tenant manages their own suite while you keep control of common doors, with tenant turnover handled by deactivating a credential rather than rekeying a cylinder and hoping every copy came back.
The operator with steady staff turnover
- What brought you here
- You run a warehouse, a restaurant group, or a shop with shift staff, and offboarding currently means asking someone for their key back. You've rekeyed the back door twice this year and you're not confident it helped.
- What you're actually worried about
- Not theft on the shift — theft at 2am by someone who left three months ago and still has a working key, which you'd never be able to prove either way.
Credentials are issued per person and switched off in seconds from a browser, so offboarding becomes a checkbox in your existing process. And every door event is attributed to a person, which turns 'somebody was in here' into a specific question with a specific answer.
The manager with a compliance or safety driver
- What brought you here
- An auditor, an insurer, a client contract, or your own head office has asked you to show restricted access to a specific area — a server room, a pharmacy fridge, a records room, a bonded cage — and prove who entered it and when.
- What you're actually worried about
- Being asked for an access log during an audit or an investigation and having nothing to produce but a statement about who has keys.
We design around the restricted area first, then the perimeter, and we set up exportable logs before you need them — including a written record of who holds administrator rights, since that's the next question auditors ask.
What an access control install looks like from your side of it
Most of this job happens at the doors, and most of the decisions are yours. Here's the real sequence, including the parts people don't expect to have to think about.
Door-by-door survey
We open and close every door you want controlled. We look at what it's made of, which way it swings, what hardware is already in it, whether the frame can take a strike, whether there's a fire rating, and whether it's on an exit route. We check where a controller and power can live and how cable gets to each door.
Tell us what each door is for and who should be able to use it. Also tell us which doors are on your fire exit routes and whether the building has a fire alarm panel — that determines what hardware we're even allowed to consider for those openings.
Zone design, credential choice, fixed quote
You get a door schedule listing every opening, the hardware proposed for it and why, the zone and schedule structure, the credential type, and a fixed price by line item. Where a door needs work before it can be controlled at all, that's a separate line, not a surprise later.
Decide your groups before we build them. Not names — roles. All-hours staff, business-hours staff, cleaners after 6pm, contractors on a date range, one person who can open the records room. Bring this as a list; it becomes the system.
Hardware, cabling, controllers, door testing
We run cable, fit readers, strikes or locks, request-to-exit devices and door position switches, mount the controller and power supply, then test each door individually — badge in, exit freely, door held, door forced, and release on fire alarm where that applies.
Give us the doors for the day. A controlled door can't be in normal service while it's being cut, wired, and tested, so pick the sequence that hurts least. If a door genuinely cannot be out of service during hours, tell us at survey, not on the morning.
People, credentials, and schedules
We load your groups and schedules, issue and assign credentials to named people, set up administrator accounts with the right level for each one, and test a real badge at every door against every schedule.
Supply the staff list, with the correct spelling of names and who belongs to which group. This is the one step that stalls projects — the hardware is done and everyone's waiting on a spreadsheet. Also nominate who in your organisation is allowed to add and remove people.
Training and documentation
We sit with your administrators and have them add a person, revoke a person, change a schedule, and pull an access report while we watch — rather than showing them and leaving. We hand over the door schedule, the as-built, and the credential register.
Send the person who'll actually do onboarding and offboarding, usually someone in HR or operations rather than the person who signed the quote. A system nobody in the building can administer quietly reverts to a propped door.
Service and system health
We watch for controllers dropping offline and doors reporting faults. We come out for hardware failures, and we're available when your building changes — a new wall, a new tenant, a door that's started binding in the heat.
Audit your own user list twice a year. We'll remind you and can run the report, but only you know which of those names still works here.
Have this ready and the job goes faster
- A list of every door you want controlled, and which of them are on fire exit routes
- Your role groups and the hours each one should have — written down before install day
- A staff list with correct names, and who is authorised to add and remove people
- Landlord or base-building approval if you lease, especially for exterior and common doors
- Existing door hardware details and whether any doors are fire-rated
- Power and a network connection near where the controller will live
- Who currently holds keys, including contractors, cleaners, and former tenants
Why the door, not the reader, decides what this costs
People price access control by counting readers. That's rarely where the money is. We quote fixed after a door-by-door survey, because these are the factors that actually move the number.
The door and the hardware it can take
This is almost always the largest variable. A hollow metal door in a prepped frame takes an electric strike quickly. An aluminum storefront, a glass door with a patch fitting, a fire-rated door, a double door with a mullion, or an overhead door each need different hardware and more labour — and some doors need a locksmith's work before they can be controlled at all. Two doors ten feet apart can differ by a wide margin.
Cable runs and where the controller lives
A door twenty feet from the controller in an open ceiling is quick. A door on the far side of the building, across a firewall, through concrete, or in a separate structure is where hours go. Where we can put the controller and power supply often matters more than how many doors there are.
How many doors, and how alike they are
Cost per door drops as the count rises, because the controller, power, software and setup are largely shared. Ten similar interior doors are far cheaper per door than three awkward exterior ones. If you're phasing, tell us the end state up front so we size the controller and power for it once.
Credential type and how you'll manage people
Cards and fobs, mobile credentials on a phone, PIN, or a combination — each has a different up-front and ongoing cost. Mobile credentials remove the cost of replacing lost cards but usually carry a per-user fee. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your headcount and how often it turns over.
On-premise versus hosted management
A controller and software you own outright means a higher install and no monthly. A hosted platform means a lower install and a recurring per-door or per-user cost, with updates and remote access included. For a single small site the owned route often wins; across several sites, the hosted route usually does. We'll model both rather than push one.
Integration with what you already run
Tying access events to your cameras, your alarm, or your staff directory so offboarding happens once is genuinely useful — and it's engineering time, not a checkbox. It's worth doing where your headcount churns; for a six-person office it usually isn't, and we'll say so.
The survey and the quote are free, and the quote is fixed. The honest note on this service: access control is easy to over-buy. Plenty of sites only need two or three doors controlled and the rest left on good mechanical hardware, and we'd rather quote you that and be right than quote every door in the building and be wrong.
Answered before you have to ask
“Is putting a mag-lock on my exit door even allowed?”
That depends entirely on the door, the building, and its occupancy, and it's a question we settle at survey rather than on a website. What we can tell you is how we approach it: a controlled door on an exit route has to let people out freely without needing a credential, knowledge, or a special trick. That's handled with request-to-exit hardware, and where a magnetic lock is used it's tied into the fire alarm so it releases. In many cases the cleaner answer is an electric strike or an electrified lockset instead, which keeps the mechanical exit function of the door intact. We confirm what your specific doors and your authority having jurisdiction require, in writing, before we order anything — and if a door shouldn't be locked the way you've asked, we'll tell you and propose what it should be.
“What happens to my doors when the power goes out?”
It depends on how each door is specified, and that's a decision you make with us rather than one you discover afterwards. Some doors are specified to fail secure and stay locked, with free exit from inside unaffected. Others — typically on exit routes — are specified to fail safe and release. We put a battery backup on the controller and power supply so the system keeps running and keeps logging through an ordinary outage, and we hand you a written list of which doors behave which way, plus how to get in mechanically if everything is down. Yes, that means keeping some keys. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't thought about a long winter outage.
“If I ever leave you, am I stuck with hardware I can't use?”
You own the readers, locks, controllers and cabling outright — that's yours regardless. The part to ask about with anyone, us included, is the management platform: hosted systems are the ones where leaving can mean losing your interface. So before we quote a hosted platform we tell you what happens to your door hardware and your historical logs if you stop paying, and we export your access history for you on request at any time, not just on the way out. If being able to walk away matters more to you than remote convenience, say so and we'll spec an owned on-premise system instead.
“My building already has readers from a previous system. Can any of it be reused?”
Frequently, yes — and the wiring is the valuable part. Cable in the walls, door position switches, request-to-exit devices, electric strikes and mag-locks often carry over even when the readers and controllers don't, and that can take a large share out of a quote. Older proximity readers and cards are the usual casualty, partly on age and partly because the older credential formats are easy to clone. We'll walk your existing hardware at survey and tell you specifically what stays, including when the answer is 'most of it and you only need a new head end'.
“Who can see the access logs? My staff won't love being tracked.”
A fair concern, and the answer is that you decide and we document it. Administrator rights are per-person and tiered, so a supervisor can be given the ability to issue a credential without the ability to pull a report on a colleague's movements. Employee access records and video are personal information, and how long you keep them and who can look at them should be a written policy rather than an accident of the defaults. We set retention and access levels with you at handover and give you the record of who holds what, and we'd encourage you to tell your staff what's logged — systems that are explained cause far fewer problems than systems that are discovered.
“Can't I just buy a smart lock per door and manage it from an app?”
For a single interior door — a small office suite, a storage room — sometimes genuinely yes, and we'll tell you when that's the honest answer rather than sell you a controller you don't need. It stops working as the door count grows: each lock is its own island with its own battery and its own app, there's no single schedule or single report across them, and battery-powered consumer hardware on a heavy exterior door in an Ontario winter is a service call waiting to happen. The line we'd draw is roughly this — one or two low-risk interior doors, do it yourself; anything exterior, fire-rated, on an exit route, or more than a few doors, don't.
How it stacks up
Traditional locks can't tell you who entered, when, or if the key was copied. Card access can.
| Feature | RiowellCard Access | Vs.Traditional Locks | Vs.No System |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lost key risk | Zero — disable in seconds | Rekey entire building | Unlimited risk |
| Access scheduling | Per-person, per-zone, per-hour | Keys work 24/7 | N/A |
| Audit trail | Every event logged | None | None |
| Employee offboarding | Instant remote revoke | Collect keys & hope | N/A |
| Multi-site management | Single dashboard | Separate keyrings | N/A |
| Camera integration | Automatic snapshots | Not possible | N/A |
Built for commercial properties of all sizes
From a single office suite to a multi-building campus with hundreds of employees. We design access systems scaled to your headcount, floor plan, and compliance requirements.
“We had a tenant leave and we weren't sure if all the keys had been returned. Riowell replaced the whole building with card access in three days. Now we just click a button to revoke access — and I can see exactly who enters every suite. Should have done this years ago.”
Stop handing out keys.
Start controlling access.
Book a free access audit. We'll walk your building, map every entry point, and design a card access system that eliminates key risk and gives you full visibility into who goes where.
Card access control in your city
Door hardware, base-building integration and tenant turnover all look different in a downtown tower than in a single-storey industrial unit. Pick your city to see how we handle the local building stock.
Frequently Asked Questions
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