Running check-in kiosks on the day

Setup is one-time; this is the every-week bit. A registration kiosk at the door, a device outside each room, a leader with a passcode, and by the second month it’s second nature; the leader whose fourteen-year-old set up the tablet the first week will be running it solo by week three.

Launching and logins

1. On each device, go to yoursite.org/checkin. Launching needs a login with Attendance permission over the groups being checked in, and when the kiosk launches you’ll be asked which check-in groups it should serve and which printers to use.
2. Once launched, a yellow banner offers “log out (but keep using this kiosk)”. Click it on any kiosk left in public: the kiosk keeps running on a saved token, but the login can’t be used for anything else, and from then on the leader functions need the short leader password instead, four digits your team can share.
3. Three login patterns work. An admin launches every device, logs each out, and hands the team the passcode. Or each leader has their own login with attendance permission over only their group, in which case they only see and launch their group. Or, most common for Sundays, one shared “check-in” login with attendance over all the Sunday groups, so any kiosk can check in a whole family across every group in one go.

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Registration at the door, check-in at the room

1. A kiosk launched with several groups makes a registration point for everyone: families type a surname, tick who’s here, choose today’s guardian, and labels print. Fast for people you know.
2. New guests are the slow lane, a full form for each child plus guardian, so don’t let them block the queue: keep the main kiosk moving and have a leader circulating with a phone or spare tablet to register newcomers off to one side.
3. Here’s the trick for room doors: the same device converts. Tap the Kiosk Mode leader button (passcode required if logged out), and you can switch between registration, check-in/out only, or both, and relaunch the kiosk with a subset of the event’s check-in groups. So the tablet that spent the first half hour registering everyone at the entrance becomes the check-in-only kiosk for just the crèche at the crèche door.
4. If a guardian is staying in the room, check them in too. The principle the whole system is built on: everyone in the room is accounted for, every adult has a label, and it’s all in the audit trail.

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The Leader Register and closing up

1. The Leader Register (behind the passcode) shows everyone’s status, registered, checked in, checked out, with MADI visible and sortable and each child’s guardian name and number. From here a leader can reprint labels, check people in or out manually, view the audit report, log an incident, or check a guardian in.
2. The incident log is your accident book: record it when it happens, and a warning appears at check-out so the collecting guardian hears about the bumped head before they leave.
3. The emergency SMS button texts a child’s guardian a pre-formatted “please attend to [child] in [group]”, no personal details included, invaluable when the parent is somewhere in a dark auditorium.
4. Under Kiosk Settings you can close one kiosk (others keep running) or close the whole check-in early. When a check-in closes, automatically at the close time or manually, no one else can check in or out, one-off guest profiles are removed or moved to your holding group, everyone who never registered is marked absent, and the summary email goes out.

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Good to know

• Any Wi-Fi or 4G works; the kiosks don’t need to be on the building’s network. If you run several devices and printers, number them and pair one with one; getting the box of kit out on a Sunday morning becomes trivial.
• Kiosk open and close times come from your settings, so if a kiosk isn’t showing the event, the check-in probably isn’t open yet; where settings live explains where to look.
• The weekly routine really is just: connect, launch, register, check in, check out. The clever part was the setup, and you only do that once.