Free printable worksheet
Four different parties can tell you what your cameras have to do. Your insurance carrier, your regulator, your landlord and the city. Each writes its own rules, so they rarely line up. This guide shows what each one actually asks. It gives you a worksheet to fill in before you buy anything. And it names the five failures we get called in to fix, after a claim or an inspection has already gone wrong.
Start here
Most owners call us asking what the law requires. Usually there is no general law that sets a camera specification for their business. Instead there are four separate parties who can each impose a requirement, and the one that catches people out is almost never the one they were worried about.
Carriers commonly ask four things. Are the entrances and points of sale covered. How many days of footage do you keep. Can you actually produce a clip when asked. Was the system professionally installed. Get the answers in writing. A broker saying “any cameras are fine” on the phone is not something you can hold anyone to later.
Industry conditions are usually written into the licence or the conditional use permit rather than into general law, which is why searching for them online rarely works. Cannabis retail, alcohol licences, pharmacies, firearms dealers and childcare all carry their own conditions. Ask your regulator or your attorney for the condition number, not a summary.
Where you may drill, where cable may run, what may be mounted on a shared wall or in a common area, and who owns the equipment when the lease ends. In a multi-tenant building this is the requirement that most often forces a design change late, after the equipment is already ordered.
Low-voltage work is permitted work. Anything that touches fire or life safety has its own process. Exterior mounting in a historic district has rules of its own. A licensed contractor handles this, but you should know it exists so a deadline is not set on the assumption that installation is instant.
One practical rule from ten years of doing this in LA: whoever can cost you money is the authority. If the insurer will deny a claim, the insurer’s requirement is the one that decides your system, even if nothing in the law agrees.
The worksheet
Print this page and fill it in. Every one of these ten answers changes either the equipment, the storage or the price, and every one of them is cheaper to get before installation than after. Bring the sheet to any installer, including us.
Insurer, regulator, landlord, a loss you have already had, or your own decision.Why it matters: it decides who has to be satisfied at the end, and therefore who gets to define “done”.
Name the document and the clause or condition number.If nobody can point to it in writing, you are buying to a rumour. That is how businesses end up with the wrong system twice.
Write the number, not “as long as possible”.Retention sizes the recorder and is the single biggest driver of storage cost. See the storage table below before you answer.
Entrances, registers, safe, stockroom, loading dock, yard, parking, alley.A list of rooms produces a real quote. “The whole place” produces a guess, and guesses drift upward.
These are two different cameras at two different prices.A wide camera that shows someone took something is not the same as a camera a detective can use. Most sites need a few of each, not all of one.
If yes, say where and at what speed vehicles pass.Plate capture is a dedicated camera with its own placement, angle and lighting. A general overview camera will not do it, no matter how many megapixels it has.
Name the person and the deadline.This is the most commonly skipped answer and the most commonly regretted one. If only the installer can export footage, you do not really have footage.
Default answer in California: assume no.Many business cameras ship with the microphone switched on. Unless a lawyer has told you in writing that your situation is permitted, the safe setting is off.
Restrooms, locker rooms, changing areas, and anywhere else you have agreed to leave alone.Mark them on the floor plan now. A camera in the wrong place turns a security upgrade into a separate legal problem.
Name the company and the person, and where the credentials are kept.Systems fail quietly. The businesses we rescue usually had working cameras once and nobody whose job it was to notice they had stopped.
From the service calls
These are the five reasons businesses call us after the fact. Every one of them was avoidable at design time and expensive afterwards.
The incident is reported a week later, the drive holds nine days, and by the time anyone looks it has overwritten itself. Nobody had ever checked how far back the system actually went. Check yours today: open the recorder and see what the oldest available date is.
The footage exists, and the only person who knows how to export it left the company or was the installer who is no longer answering. An insurer or a detective will not wait. Somebody on site should have exported a clip at least once, as practice, before it mattered.
Overhead cameras aimed straight down at a till give you a beautiful view of the top of a head. Identification needs a camera at face height on the path in, where light falls on the face rather than behind it.
Often nobody chose it — the cameras arrived that way and were installed as delivered. In California this is the setting most likely to turn your evidence into somebody else’s complaint. Check the microphone setting on every camera you already own.
Usually a wide-angle lens covering more than whoever mounted it intended, or a camera moved later by someone who did not know the rules. Positions get documented at handover for a reason: so that a year from now you can prove what each camera does and does not see.
Not one of these is a hardware failure. All five are design and handover failures. That is why the worksheet above is worth more to you than a longer camera spec sheet.
California basics
General points, not legal advice. Where your situation is unusual, ask an attorney — but these are the four that come up on almost every commercial job we do.
Video surveillance of your own business property is generally accepted practice. The complications come from audio, from employee areas and from anything your camera can see beyond your property line.
California treats recording a conversation very differently from recording video, and business cameras frequently arrive with microphones enabled. We disable them at commissioning unless a client specifically instructs otherwise in writing. If you already have cameras, this is the first thing to go and check.
Cameras in work areas are generally acceptable. Restrooms, locker rooms and rooms set aside for changing clothes are not. Tell your staff in writing that cameras are present rather than letting them find out, because surprise surveillance creates a second problem on top of the first one.
If your recorder is in the cloud, know which company holds the footage, which country it sits in, and who at that company can view it. If it is on site, know where the box is and whether someone could simply walk out with it — recorders get stolen in the same burglary the cameras recorded.
More detail on the recording and privacy side: California security camera laws and privacy guide.
The number that sets the price
Retention is the answer most owners guess at, and it is the one that decides the size of the recorder. Here is the honest arithmetic so you can pick a number rather than hope.
| Cameras | Recorded per day | Storage for 30 days | Storage for 90 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 cameras | about 90 GB | about 3 TB | about 8 TB |
| 8 cameras | about 180 GB | about 6 TB | about 16 TB |
| 16 cameras | about 360 GB | about 11 TB | about 32 TB |
| 32 cameras | about 720 GB | about 22 TB | about 64 TB |
Assumes 4MP cameras, H.265 compression, recording continuously around the clock at roughly 2 Mbps each. Recording only on motion typically stretches these figures two to three times — but you lose the continuous record, and some carriers and regulators specifically want the gaps filled. Higher resolution, higher frame rate and busy scenes all push storage up. Treat this as planning arithmetic and confirm the final figure against the actual cameras quoted.
The practical takeaway: if somebody has told you to keep 90 days, that is a storage decision before it is a camera decision. It has to be in the quote from the start. Adding retention later usually means replacing the recorder. For pricing on the rest of the system see the CCTV installation cost guide or run the security system cost calculator.
By industry
Each of these has its own pattern of requirements and its own common mistake. Start with the guide for your industry, then come back to the worksheet.
Not listed? The worksheet still applies — every business we have installed for fits one of the four sources at the top of this page. Start with business security in Los Angeles or just call and describe the site.
Already have cameras?
If a system is already installed, you do not need a quote to find out whether it would survive a claim. Do these three things yourself.
Open the recorder and play something from the oldest date available. That date, not the sales brochure, is your real retention.
Pick any two minutes, export it to a USB drive, and open it on a different computer. If that fails, it will also fail on the day it matters.
Stand where a customer stands and have someone watch the screen. If they cannot say who you are, the camera is recording an event, not a person.
It is often fixable without replacing everything. See upgrading old security cameras. Or send us the make and model and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth keeping.
Questions we get asked
No. There is no single camera specification that applies to every California business. The requirements come from your carrier, your licence or permit, your lease and the city, and they are written independently of each other. Collect each one in writing before you buy equipment.
It depends who is asking. Some licensed industries have a period written into their licence conditions, insurers commonly ask for 30 days, and many businesses keep whatever the drive happens to hold. Decide the number first, because it sizes the recorder.
Assume not. California treats recording a confidential conversation very differently from recording video, and cameras often arrive with microphones on. Unless a lawyer has told you in writing that your situation is permitted, the safe setting is off.
Restrooms, locker rooms and rooms set aside for changing clothes. Beyond those the test is whether someone in that spot would reasonably expect privacy. Work areas are generally fine, but tell your staff in writing.
Sometimes, and it varies by carrier. Ask your broker two things in writing: does a professionally installed system change the premium, and does it change the deductible or the conditions on a theft claim. The second question often matters more.
Business CCTV in Los Angeles typically runs from about $1,500 for a very small site to $30,000 and beyond for a large facility. The property and the requirement decide the camera count, not a package. The on-site consultation is free and the written scope names the actual equipment.
The next step
You do not need every answer. Bring what you have, even just “my insurer sent this email”. We will come to the site and tell you what it actually requires in equipment terms, for free. If your existing system already meets it, we will say so and you will not hear from us again.
Tell us the type of business, roughly how big the space is, and who is requiring the cameras. Forward the insurer letter or the licence condition if you have it. Ten minutes, no site visit needed yet.
We walk the site, mark camera positions against your requirement, check where cable can legally run in your building, and confirm what retention will actually take. We work around your trading hours.
A written scope naming the actual cameras, the recorder, the retention in days and the price. Something you can hand to your insurer, your regulator or your landlord before you commit to anything.
“I already have cameras. Do I have to start over?”
Usually not. Cable, mounts and sometimes the cameras themselves can often stay. Send us the make and model and we will tell you before we visit whether it is worth keeping. See upgrading old security cameras.
“I have a deadline. How fast can this happen?”
Same-day response, and we will tell you honestly on the first call whether your date is realistic. If it is not, we will say so rather than take the deposit and find out later. Say the date out loud when you call.
“Will you sell me more cameras than I need?”
The requirement decides the count, which is exactly why we ask for it in writing first. We routinely tell businesses which cameras to drop. A scope you can check against a document is harder to inflate than a package price.
“Do we have to close while you install?”
No. Most commercial work is done before opening, after closing or overnight. Tell us your trading hours on the first call and the schedule gets built around them.
“Who owns the footage, and can you see it?”
You do. By default the recording stays on equipment at your premises. You hold the credentials, and remote access is set up only if you ask for it. We do not need access to your video to support the system.
“What if it breaks in six months?”
You call the same number. We service what we install, and we also take over systems other companies walked away from — see service and repair. Ask on the first call who answers the phone in year two.
“Can you talk to my broker or compliance person directly?”
Yes, and it usually saves a round trip. Put us on the email with them and we will answer the technical questions in writing so nothing gets lost being relayed twice.
“We are a small shop. Is this worth it?”
Sometimes the honest answer is that four well-placed cameras will do everything you need and cost less than you feared. Sometimes it is that what you have is fine. Either way you find out for free, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a system you resent.
Free. About 10 minutes. No obligation. English and Spanish. Licensed California ACO 7755 and C-10, insured and bonded since 2016. Innov8av Inc., 269 S Mariposa Ave Unit 407, Los Angeles CA 90004.
Keep going: Business security in Los Angeles · Camera placement checklist · CCTV installation cost · California camera and privacy rules