People are always looking for free parking. If you offer free parking for anything from a school to a hospital to a grocery store or movie theater (particularly in a city or commercial center), chances are that people are going to park in your lot who are not paying for your services. This may not bother you if you have the space, but if parking spaces are at a premium, you want some way of determining that the people who are using your services are the ones who get to park in your lot.

You might want to deal with long-term and short-term parking in different ways. A student who is going to be attending college for several years, or an employee who expects to work for you indefinitely would probably be happy to register his license plate and car model with you and put a sticker in his car window. If you want to differentiate between students and faculty, or surgeons, NPs, and residents, you can have a couple of different colors of parking permit stickers, and color code areas of your parking lot so that people with seniority get the spaces closer to the building.

Short-term Parking Permits

People who are just visiting for a day or who are just contracted to do a short-term job, however, won't necessarily fit into the same structure for parking permits. In some cases, you might want your guests to get the best parking options. In other cases, they may have to look for whatever parking is available. Either way, they still need something to identify their cars so that security doesn't call to have them towed or give them a ticket.

Self-expiring parking permits, which change colors to indicate they have expired, are a great option because they can be taken care of in a station at the entrance to the parking lot. A visitor can pull in and get a card to hang from his windshield--something simple like a card with "approved visitor" printed on it. It can be set to expire in a day or half-day and activated when the guest enters the lot. That way, your security guard can easily observe whether the pass is valid or not.