Terminals.

A terminal is a named place people check in: a door, a gate, a lane, a desk. It is not a device, and it is not tied to a phone.

Why terminals exist

Every attendance record stores the terminal it came through. That single fact makes several things possible:

• The live door feed shows which entrance is busy while the event is running, so you can move staff to it.
• The terminal leaderboard shows which door processed the most people.
• When something goes wrong, an angry guest, a disputed scan, you can see which lane it happened at and who was working it.

Without terminals you still get check-ins, but you lose the ability to say where.

Creating terminals

Open Terminals from the Setup group and choose Add Terminal. Give it a name.

Name it what the crew calls it out loud. Main Door, Gate B, VIP Entrance, Registration Desk, Kit Collection. If two people would describe the same spot differently, pick the one that will be said over a radio.

One terminal is enough for a small event. Larger events want one per physical entry point, and it is worth adding one for the desk that handles problems, so exceptions are visibly separate from the main flow.

Terminals and devices are not the same

Five volunteers with five phones can all select Main Door and scan at once. Their scans all record against Main Door.

The opposite also works: one person moving from the front door to the VIP entrance changes the terminal in the scanner settings and carries on with the same phone.

Choose terminals to describe places, and let devices come and go.

Choosing a terminal at the door

When you open the scanner, you pick a terminal and a schedule before you can scan. The choice sticks for that session, so a volunteer picks once at the start of their shift.

Renaming and deleting

Renaming a terminal renames it everywhere, including on attendance records already taken through it. That is usually right: if the door was always the same door, calling it by its correct name afterwards is an improvement.

Deleting a terminal that has attendance records against it removes the link between those check-ins and where they happened. Rename rather than delete unless the terminal was genuinely a mistake and was never used.