Straight answer: stop asking how many and start asking which positions. A warehouse has roughly eight position types that genuinely need eyes, and once you count yours the number falls out — usually somewhere between eight and twenty for a single unit, and often below the quote you were given.
Installers quote in camera counts because counts are easy to price. But two warehouses of identical floor area can need very different estates depending on how many bays they run and where value sits.
The eight positions that earn a camera
1. Each loading bay. Non-negotiable. This is where goods change hands and where most shrinkage occurs. One camera per bay, angled to see both the vehicle and the person moving stock.
2. Each pedestrian entrance. Staff, contractors, visiting drivers. These are also your attendance check-in points if you run camera-based attendance, so placement should suit face height, not just doorway coverage.
3. The despatch desk. Where responsibility formally transfers. Disputes about what left the building are settled here or not at all.
4. Receiving. The mirror image, and the position most often skipped. Shortages that originate at intake get blamed on despatch for months.
5. High-value stock aisles. Not every aisle — the ones where value concentrates. This is a judgement call about your inventory, not a rule.
6. The yard gate. Vehicle in and out, with a view that captures number plates if you want ANPR later.
7. Perimeter corners. Enough to make boundary alerting work. Corners beat mid-wall positions because one camera covers two runs.
8. The office and server area. Small, cheap, and the position people regret skipping.
Why the count matters less than you think
Two warehouses, same floor plate. One has two bays and one entrance: perhaps ten cameras. One has six bays, three entrances and a separate driver gate: perhaps twenty-two. Neither number tells you anything without the position list behind it.
This is why we recommend asking any installer for a position list, not a count — and why our own quotes are itemised that way. A count you cannot interrogate is a count you cannot compare.
The part that changes the arithmetic
Here is what actually determines whether a warehouse estate is useful: whether anybody finds out when something happens.
Twenty cameras recording to a disk nobody reviews is a documentation system. Ten cameras with boundary alerts, camera-offline warnings and after-hours detection is a security system. If you are choosing between "more cameras" and "the cameras you have, made to alert," the second wins almost every time — and it is usually cheaper.
We build the intelligence layer, so weigh that accordingly. The underlying maths does not need us to be right about anything else: footage reviewed after the fact has a fraction of the value of an alert delivered while something is still happening.
Before you accept a quote
Ask for the position list. Check that receiving is on it. Confirm the bay cameras see people and not just vehicles. And ask what happens the day a camera goes dark — because on most warehouse estates we audit, at least one already has.