How many cameras does a small business need?

Most small sites end up with somewhere between four and sixteen cameras, but the right number comes from your floor plan, not a rule of thumb. Walk the site with a sketch and mark three kinds of places.

1. Every way in and out

Each customer entrance, staff door, loading door and gate gets a camera that can identify a face as people come through. That usually means a camera mounted close to the door rather than one wide view of the whole room.

2. Where money and stock change hands

Registers, cash offices, stockrooms and high-value shelves. Here you want enough detail to see hands and items, so plan one camera per point rather than trying to cover several from the ceiling corner.

3. General areas

Sales floor, aisles, parking and the building perimeter. These cameras are for observation — understanding what happened — so wider lenses and fewer cameras are fine.

Detection, recognition, identification

The IEC 62676-4 standard describes how much image detail each task needs, measured in pixels per metre at the target: roughly 25 px/m to detect a person, 62 px/m to observe, 125 px/m to recognise someone you know and 250 px/m to identify a stranger. The closer the camera and the higher its resolution, the more pixels land on a face. Our guide on 4MP vs. 4K shows the maths.

Size the recorder with headroom

Add up the cameras, then choose an NVR with spare channels — an 8-channel recorder for a 5-camera plan, a 16-channel for 10–12. Adding a camera later is then a cable run, not a new recorder. Browse NVRs & DVRs or start from a complete kit.

Not sure about a site? Send us a floor plan and we will suggest camera positions and a parts list.