The three questions every enquiry gets

Make and model, technology, encoding scheme

Those three facts determine whether a band can work on a property's estate, and all three live at the property rather than with us. With all three, compatibility is usually determinable on paper within a day. With two, any answer is a guess dressed as a quotation. This is why an enquiry saying "we need RFID wristbands" starts with questions rather than a price, and why that is not evasion.

Send a spare card

The single most useful thing an enquiry can include is a working credential from the existing estate. It can be examined directly to establish frequency and chip family, which resolves in minutes what an email thread resolves in a week. It is not always possible — credentials are controlled items at many properties — but where it is, it removes most of the uncertainty immediately.

Ask the person who maintains the locks

The information rarely sits with the person raising the enquiry. It sits with whoever maintains the access-control system, and often with an external integrator who configured it years ago. Getting them into the conversation early is worth more than any amount of specification writing, particularly because they are also the person who will run the sample test on a real door.

What happens when the answer is no

Occasionally the answer is that the platform will not accept a third-party credential at all, because the vendor holds the keys. We say so, and we say it before an order rather than after production. There is no version of that conversation that ends well later, and a supplier who avoids having it early is not doing a property a favour.