Which Centrios Lock Fits Which Door? A Small-Business Guide to Every Opening

Most buildings do not have one access problem. They have five or six, and they were solved at different times by different people.

The front entry got a keypad. The office doors are still on keys cut years ago. The exit door at the back has a panic bar nobody can manage. The gate runs on a padlock, and the combination has not changed since the last contractor left.

Then someone leaves. Maybe they return their key, maybe they do not. Either way you are left with a question you cannot answer: who still has a way in? The usual options are rekeying the building, calling a locksmith, or deciding it is probably fine.

Centrios is a full line of commercial keyless hardware built so one system covers every opening, managed from a single app. This guide walks a typical small commercial building door by door and names the device that fits each one.

Office and interior doors: cylindrical locks

This is the door you have the most of, and the one that causes the most churn.

A cylindrical lock is the standard lever set you already know, with the electronics built into the housing. It fits the same prep as the mechanical lever it replaces, which is why this is usually the easiest opening to convert. Private offices, back rooms, server closets, storage.

CEB100 keeps a key cylinder alongside the keypad, so there is a mechanical override. CEB102 has no cylinder at all.

Which you want depends on who you trust with a key. The cylinder is a convenience and a liability in the same part: useful when a battery dies or a phone is flat, and one more thing to track when someone leaves. Buildings with high staff turnover often go cylinder-less on interior doors and keep the override for the main entry only.

Main entries: mortise locks

The front door takes more traffic in a week than an office door takes in a month, and it is the one a visitor sees first.

A mortise lock sits in a pocket cut into the edge of the door rather than through a round bore. It is a heavier build than a cylindrical, with more internal hardware, and it is what most commercial main entries already use.

CEM100 carries a key cylinder. CEM102 does not.

The thing to check before you order is what is in the door now. A door prepped for a cylindrical lock cannot take a mortise without new prep, and that is a job for an installer, not an afternoon. If you are not sure what you have, look at the edge of the door: a mortise shows a tall flat faceplate, a cylindrical shows a smaller one around a round bolt.

Exit doors: exit trim and device

This is the opening most buildings give up on.

An exit door has a panic bar on the inside, because people have to be able to get out without thinking. The outside is where access control goes, and it is a different kind of hardware from a lockset: trim that mounts to the door and works with the exit device rather than replacing it.

The CEE100TD line covers this. The keypad trim goes on the outside, the exit device stays on the inside, and the door keeps doing the one thing it must always do.

Two things to confirm before ordering. First, what exit device is on the door now, since the trim has to match it. Second, which way the door swings and which side the hinges are on. Both are quick to check and both are expensive to get wrong.

Gates, yards and storage: padlocks

Everything above assumes a door in a frame. Plenty of openings are not.

A perimeter gate, a yard, a storage container, a roll-up door, a utility cage. These usually run on a padlock with a combination that was set once and shared ever since, or a key that lives in somebody's truck.

The CEP200 is a keyless padlock that joins the same system as the locks on your doors. It matters more than it sounds. A gate is often the opening with the loosest control and the least oversight, precisely because it never felt like part of the building.

Where a lockset will not fit: readers and credentials

Some openings have nowhere to put a lock.

A glass storefront door with a narrow stile. An elevator. A gate operator. An automatic door. A turnstile. A cabinet. In each case the locking is handled by something else already in place, and what you need is a way to tell that something to release.

The CER is a reader for exactly this. It mounts on the wall beside the opening rather than in the door, and it works with the hardware that is already there.

It is also the answer when you want access control somewhere a lockset would look wrong. A reader on the wall is a smaller intervention than new hardware on a glass door.

Cards and fobs

Your team still needs something to carry. Phones are the obvious credential, and they work for most people, but not everyone wants an app on a personal phone and not every role suits one.

Cards and fobs cover that gap. They are also what you hand a contractor, a cleaner, or a seasonal hire, and what you take back when the job ends.

Walk your building

Take ten minutes and write down every opening. Not the ones you think need fixing. All of them.

Two questions are worth asking as you go. How many keys exist for this door, and could you say who holds them? If the answer to the second is no, that is where to start.

One system, not six

The point of walking the building is not to replace everything at once. Most people do not. They start with the door that worries them, then the next one.

What matters is that the openings end up on one system rather than six. A building where the front door, the office, the exit door and the gate all answer to the same app is a building where an employee leaving is an afternoon's admin instead of a locksmith's invoice.

Explore the Centrios lineup

Not sure what fits your doors? Call us on (877) 439-5377, Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5pm ET. Tell us how many openings you have and what type, and we will match them.