The law prohibits certain types of people from being served alcohol or cigarettes. Having this information is crucial to your business if you run a bar. This helps bar owners from breaking the rules to avoid getting heavy fines or losing their license which is not good for business. Using an ID scanner to verify someone's age and identity ensures that it will be easier and faster for you to spot patrons who can bring you problems. These machines can help protect businesses and stop crimes from happening.

The sleek black machines also can pick up information such as social security numbers of the people's whose IDs have been scanned, their height and eye color.  Most of these machines can also detect if the ID used is expired or fake. Many people who use these machines buy them to keep out underage patrons.  

Before a patron gets into your bar, they will have to give their ID it to a security person before getting into the venue. This means that bar patrons need to carry around their driving license or passport and produce it on demand. The scanning machine will then capture the photo and all the details in the ID and then store it in a database. The age of the patron may also be flashed across the screen of the system in bold letters. This helps to know on the spot whether someone is underage or not. There is also the option of taking the person’s photo at the door and then storing it in a database.

If someone visits several venues in one night, their personal details can be stored in multiple databases. If they happen to be banned from one venue, their details will be given to the police, who will then distribute the details to other venues within the region. If the person has been banned from another club it will show the reasons why they have been banned and you can decide whether to allow them into your bar or not.

The police can also get weekly reports from various venues about any crimes or problems experienced and share it with bar owners. This will keep you in the loop about what is happening and whether a certain individual will cause problems for you if let into the bar. The patron's information can then be checked against other data sets and be kept stored. 

The machine is also able to show you the kind of activities that your customers are involved in. The device can capture data, such as the location the patrons, their gender and how often they visit the establishment; and can also detect whether the ID has been used more than twice in the establishment. Some of the machines can text you information about how many people are in your establishment and the demographics gathered by the machine.

Some club owners say that some of the sophisticated scanners help them know areas they can target when advertising. This is because when they collect the information, they can tell the regions where most of the people are coming from and areas where less people are coming from. It is perfectly acceptable to use this information to your advantage but you can get into trouble if you are caught selling the information.

Most bar owners think that if there is a brawl in the bar and the offender is identified by the doorman, he or she can give an eye witness statement, making it easier for investigations to be carried out. However, this is not true. Without the scanner, the patrons who are already drunk are the only witnesses and if there is a camera that doesn't use the highest quality to film the location then the video quality may not be so good. So having the scanner gives evidence that the patron was at the bar at the said time.

The scanners are mainly meant to cub underage drinking and stop those who are trying to get in by using fake identification. The machine can take fingerprints; therefore a returning customer will not need to use their ID the next time.  It can also help to reduce theft since the image of every patron who visits the club can be identified by reviewing the images. Choose a device that meets the need of your business and with the features that you need. The device can prevent you from losing your license or having to pay hefty fines as a result of selling alcohol to underage customers.

Some of the ID scanners also make it easy to manage your VIP list. Once you scan their ID, you can simply add them to the VIP program and every time they are scanned in, the staff is notified that a VIP has just checked in.