Check-in profiles: every option explained

A check-in profile is a bundle of behaviour: what gets asked, what gets printed, and what’s allowed. Crèche and youth need very different check-ins, one wants a nappy-bag label and a strict pickup code, the other would rather die than wear a name sticker, and profiles are how one system serves both.

The options, section by section

1. Basic behaviour. Whether the profile is selectable or archived; whether registration and check-in happen separately (register everyone with labels early, then a quick barcode scan at handover; ideal when children start the service with their parents) or in one go (simpler when children go straight to their rooms); whether new guests can register at the kiosk, or only existing group members; and whether check-out is enabled, which lets your team record each child leaving at the kiosk.
2. Safety and eligibility. A gender-specific setting, an age range with an age rollover date (with a range of 2–3 and a rollover of 1 September, the child must have been 2 or 3 on the previous 1 September, matching how school years work), and the MADI pop-up, which flashes an alert during check-in for any child with medical, allergy or dietary information.
3. Terms and consent. Terms and conditions need two things set before they’ll appear at check-in: a date-type custom field, which is where the date of agreement gets recorded, and the terms and conditions article itself. Set only one and the terms silently never show, so set both and test a check-in to be sure. Terms apply to new guests and existing members alike. You can also add consent questions to collect, photo permission being the usual one for children’s groups.
4. Extra information. Beyond the defaults, ask for additional profile details and any custom fields you need, a child’s doctor’s contact details, say.
5. Labels. Choose which labels print and how many, per profile: a crèche profile might print a child label, guardian label and a bag label or two, while a youth profile prints one name label or none at all.
6. Texts and notifications. Guardian alert texts normally say “Please attend to [child] in [group]”; you can switch to the event name instead, and copy every alert to a duty phone. The notifications section sets who receives the summary email when each check-in closes, and how many consecutive missed weeks put someone on the follow-up list in it.

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Good to know

• Enabling check-out records who left and when, but the summary email doesn’t list anyone who was never checked out. Confirming that every child has gone home with the right person is a job for the kiosk at the time, not for the email afterwards; see the check-in summary email for what it does contain.
• The built-in default profiles can’t be edited, so copy one and tweak the copy; then copy your first age-group profile to make the next, and so on. Most churches end up with only two or three: perhaps one for crèche, one for the other children’s groups, one for youth.
• Where a profile gets applied is a separate question with a golden rule, set it on the group so it follows the group everywhere; where check-in settings live explains why, and the setup guide walks through doing it.
• ‘Allow guest children’ lets a family you already know add a new baby at the kiosk without a full guest registration.
• The MADI field and consent questions only work if the underlying data exists; get your data ready covers the groundwork.