What We Need to Key Your Job
, by United Doors and Locks, 5 min reading time
Keying is the last decision made on a project and the first thing to hold up handover. The five inputs we need to build your keying schedule, and what each one prevents.
Keying is usually the last decision made on a project and one of the first things to hold up handover. The doors are hung, the locks are on, the inspector has been and gone — and the cylinders are still sitting in a box because nobody has decided who is allowed in where. It is a paperwork problem, not a hardware problem, and it is entirely avoidable.
Here is what we need from you to key a job, why each item matters, and what happens if it is missing.
1. The door schedule with room names and numbers
We need the opening marks, and we need the room names that go with them. Numbers alone are not enough. "122A" tells us nothing about who should be able to open it; "122A — Pharmacy Store" tells us it needs to sit in a restricted group with a short key list.
The room name is what lets us group openings sensibly before you have told us anything else. If you send a schedule with numbers only, we will come back and ask for the names, and that round trip costs a day or two.
2. Who needs to open which group of doors
This is the actual keying decision, and it is the owner's to make, not ours. What we need is not a door-by-door list — it is the groups. Something like: maintenance opens everything; the floor manager opens the whole ground floor plus the stockroom; each department head opens their own suite; cleaners open corridors and restrooms but no offices.
From that we build the hierarchy: change keys for individual doors, master keys for each group, and a grand master above them.
Keep the structure as shallow as the building allows. Every level of masterkeying adds shear lines to each cylinder, which slightly reduces pick resistance and raises the chance of a key opening a lock it was never meant to. A three-level structure that reflects how the building is actually run beats a five-level structure built for a hypothetical future org chart.
3. Whether construction keying is required
If trades need access before handover, say so up front. Construction keying gives the site a temporary key that works throughout the build. At handover the permanent core goes in, and every construction key on the job dies in a single pass — no chasing subcontractors for keys they have already lost.
On interchangeable core hardware this is straightforward: the locks ship with a plastic construction core or no core at all, and the permanent cores drop in at the end in about thirty seconds each with a control key. On conventional cylinders it means construction master pinning, which has to be planned before the cylinders are pinned rather than decided afterwards.
Deciding this late is expensive. Deciding it early costs nothing.
4. The keyway already in use on the campus, if any
If the owner already has buildings, they already have a keyway — and new cylinders that do not match it create a permanent split in the key system. Two keyways on one campus means two sets of master keys, two sets of blanks, and a maintenance team carrying twice the ring for the rest of the building's life.
Tell us the keyway if you know it. If you do not, send us a photograph of an existing key — the profile is usually identifiable from the blade — or the make and model of an existing lock, and we will work it out.
This is also the moment to decide whether a restricted keyway is worth it. An open keyway like Schlage C is stocked everywhere, which is exactly why it offers no protection against a key being copied at a hardware counter. A restricted, patented keyway means blanks are only released to authorised dealers against documented authority. If the building has anything worth controlling access to, that is a decision to make now, not after the first unexplained duplicate turns up.
5. The name of the person who will hold key control
Somebody has to own the key system, and we need to know who before we cut anything. That person receives the keying schedule, the key records, and — on interchangeable core systems — the control key.
The control key deserves particular care. It does not open doors, so it is easy to treat as unimportant, but whoever holds it can pull any core in the building and put their own in its place. It needs guarding more carefully than the grand master, and it should not live in the same drawer as the operating keys.
Name a person, not a department. Key systems fail when the records belong to everyone and therefore to nobody.
What you get back
From those five inputs we produce a keying schedule: which key opens which door, the master key structure written out, the bitting list, and the number of keys of each type to cut. That document is what the cylinders get pinned from, and it is what the owner keeps as the record of their key system.
Put the keying meeting in the calendar early — while the submittal is still in review, not while the doors are being hung. It takes an hour, and it is the difference between cylinders that are ready when the doors are and cylinders that arrive three weeks after practical completion.
Send us the schedule
We prepare keying schedules for commercial projects across Texas. Send the door schedule with room names, a note on who opens what, and any existing keyway details, and we will draft the structure for you to review.
Email estimates@uniteddoorsandlocks.com or call 346-777-3031.