Start with a coverage list, not a number
Walk the building and write down each thing a camera must accomplish. The list, not a rule of thumb, is your camera count.
- Every exterior door, including fire exits and loading doors.
- Points of sale, cash handling areas and safes.
- Receiving and shipping areas where inventory changes hands.
- Server rooms, electrical rooms and anywhere keys or stock are stored.
- Parking areas and approach routes where incidents usually begin.
- Any area that has generated an incident, a complaint or an insurance claim before.
Identification versus overview
The most common design mistake is mounting everything high and wide. A camera at 3.5 m covering a whole room produces footage that shows something happened but not who did it.
Pair the two roles: an overview camera for context, and an identification camera at head height near each entry that captures usable faces. Same for vehicles — a plate camera is a dedicated, tightly framed camera, not a corner of a wide shot.
Retention drives storage, storage drives price
Decide how far back you need to look before you size recording. Many businesses settle on 30 days; insurance, franchise agreements or regulated sectors may require longer. Doubling retention roughly doubles storage, and 4K roughly quadruples the bill versus 1080p for the same days.
Under Canadian privacy expectations, keep footage no longer than you have a reason to — an indefinite retention policy is both a storage cost and a liability.
Analytics reduce the number of cameras people watch
AI analytics do not reduce how many cameras you need, but they change how the system is used: line-crossing, loitering and person/vehicle classification turn passive recording into alerts that a monitoring centre or your own staff can act on.