These settings decide whether the handset checks a driver’s licence, what it accepts from an alternative driver, and what the officer can still do when the handset has no network. They are on the General panel of the Guard App settings (see Officer Login for how to open it).

Driver licence checks and alternative drivers

Reject Expired Identity Document controls what happens when the officer scans a document (a driver’s licence, a passport or an ID card with a machine-readable zone) whose expiry date has passed. Days an expired document is still accepted sets how long after expiry the document is still allowed (0 to 365, default 30).

• Inside the grace days the officer sees a warning and can continue.
• Beyond the grace days the app declines the document and the visitor cannot be checked in on it.
• Check-out is never blocked. An expired document on the way out only shows a warning, however long it has been expired.
• A document with no readable expiry date is allowed. The check only acts on a date it can read.
• The expiry day itself is not expired. A document is late only from the day after its expiry date.
• A driver’s licence, a passport, or an ID card with a machine-readable zone is checked; a South African ID card carries no readable expiry and is not checked.
• With the switch off nothing is checked. The days field is greyed out while the switch is off, and the number you saved is kept for when you turn it back on.

If you upgrade from a version with the old driver’s licence switch and it was on, those sites now accept a document that expired up to 30 days ago, with a warning, instead of refusing it outright. Set the days to 0 to refuse from the day after expiry.

The check acts on the expiry date the app manages to read from the scanned document:

• A driver’s licence card is checked from the expiry date decoded from its barcode.
• A passport is checked from the expiry date in its machine-readable zone, the two lines of characters at the foot of the photo page.
• A document whose expiry date the app cannot read is allowed. The officer sees no warning and no refusal, so a blurred scan or an unsupported card never blocks a visitor by itself.
• On South African licence cards the handset needs the separate decoder application installed alongside the guard app. Without it the card cannot be decoded, so there is no expiry date to check. This is the usual reason the setting appears to do nothing on a new fleet - check that the decoder is deployed with the app.

Reject Expired Vehicle Licence Disc works the same way for a scanned vehicle licence disc, with its own Days an expired licence disc is still accepted (0 to 365, default 30). Warn inside the days, refuse beyond them, never block check-out, and allow a disc with no readable expiry date. This switch is off by default.

Permit Alternative ID with Valid PIN/MVL covers the case where the person at the wheel is not the person on the invitation. With it on, a different driver may proceed when they present a valid PIN or the vehicle licence disc, and the app offers the officer a Register Driver step to capture who is actually driving. With it off, only the invited driver gets in and anybody else is refused.

Two practical notes:

• The alternative driver is captured from scratch. The registration opens empty, so the officer types or scans the whole identity. It is not pre-filled from the invitation, and it should not be: the point is to record the person who is really there.
• It does not work while the handset is offline. The prompt is the app reacting to a specific answer from the server, so during an outage the offer never appears and an alternative driver cannot be processed at all. Give your officers a documented manual procedure for that case.

Working offline

Allow Offline Access Control lets the officer keep processing entries and exits while the handset has no connection, holding the transactions encrypted on the device and syncing them when it reconnects. It keeps a checkpoint moving through a network outage, at the cost of decisions made on data that may be a few minutes old.

Required Offline Credentials narrows what the app will accept while it is offline. Leave it on Default to accept the usual credential types, or name one type that a visitor must present for an offline decision to be made at all.

Allow Offline Visitor Registration lets the officer enrol a brand new visitor with no network, uploading the record later. Turn it off where a new visitor must always be checked against your watchlists before they are admitted, because that check needs the server.