attendance scanning system

Hello friends,

We have purchased CipherLab 201 door access controller. It have one peripehral to scan the magnetic card. Once it is scanned it records the time and cardnumber and date. I want to utilize this as attendance system for our company. Unfortunately it is not maintained In time or Outtime. We can set times to grant and denied. But it allows any no of times to scan in the granted time.
So i want to design my own application to maintain and IN and OUT times. How can i read the data from this controller into my VB Application and automatically Insert into database. And i dont want the my program to run and open all the time. I can do my own work and once card is scanned, it should be inserted into the database w/o my interaction. Means the application should run in the background.

Thanx in advance.