By James Kelly on February 7th, 2020
Reordering contactless cards and proximity cards can be a confusing business. There are lots of different brands, various frequencies, numerous technology families, and we’ve not even considered the card style itself.
Despite this, it’s quite easy to order a new batch of once you know how. There are a key pieces of information you need to order proximity cards produced by manufacturers such as HID. These include:
First things first. What does your access control card look like? Perhaps it isn’t even a card? Smartcard Store provides a range of card and fob styles including clamshell, standard proximity cards, key ring fobs and adhesive tags.
It’s important to choose the one that works best for your organisation, which for many will be standard-sized CR80-sized cards that can have photographic ID printed onto them via an ID card printer.
The information you need to re order access control cards will depend on the technology you are using. This guide deals primarily with contactless smart card technology offered by HID products such as 125kHz Prox, MIFARE and iClass. However, it’s worth considering if you need a magnetic stripe or Wiegand swipe added to your card. It’s worth bearing in mind that contactless smart cards can be ordered with multiple technology options.
The next thing you’ll need to know is the card format. For proximity cards, you’ll find most manufacturers use a standard 26-bit format. If you’re ordering HID cards, the standard 26-bit format is H10301.
If you’re not 100% sure on your access control card’s format, the information can usually be found on the original box or printed on your original order. If you’re still not sure, check out the best ways of identifying cards in our article here.
Each batch of cards is assigned a unique ID number. Known as the sequence number, if you’ve already printed a batch of 250 cards, the sequence start number for the next order will be 251.
If you’re unsure what your sequence start number will be, you can usually find the card range of your current access control cards on the label of your last order.
Another key piece of information you’ll need is the facility or site code assigned to your access control system. Like the card format, you’ll be able to find this out by delving into your old invoices or having a look at the box your current access control cards came in.
In most cases, the facility/site code will be a number between 0-255 that your organisation will have been assigned when your cards were first encoded. If your organisation or facility is a large one, it’s possible that there will be more than one facility code.
If you need a little more advice about re-ordering access control cards, you can speak to a friendly member of the Smartcard Store team by calling the number below.
You can find our full range of access control products on our main website, but if you want more advice before ordering, speak to a friendly member of the Smartcard Store team by calling the number below.
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