The front desk — helpers, walk-ins, and check-in without wifi

Most guests check themselves in by tapping their own name. The front desk is for everything else — the friend who wasn't on the list, the guest whose name won't come up, and the moment the venue wifi decides to take a break.

You'll find it two places: Front desk at the bottom of the kiosk (where the person working the door uses it), and a Front desk section in Setup on your Event Day tab (where you prepare it).

Who's working the door

In Setup → Front desk there's a staff roster. Add each helper by name, with an optional 4-digit PIN of their own, and they appear in the list. Editing or clearing a PIN, or removing a helper entirely, is one tap each.

It's a small thing that saves a real conversation: you know who agreed to work the first hour, and you can take someone off the list the moment their shift ends.

The roster lives on your event, not on a device — so a helper doesn't need an account, an app, or a login. They just need the kiosk in front of them. A helper can enter their PIN at the top of the front desk's door tools, and the check-ins and walk-ins done on that kiosk are then written to the audit trail under their name, including name taps, until the kiosk is locked again. Skipping the PIN is fine; those actions are logged as the front desk.

Walk-ins

Someone turned up who isn't on your list? On the kiosk, tap Front desk → Add walk-in, type their name, and they're added to your guest list and checked in in one step. You can pick a table for them at the same time (Table (optional)). If the name matches someone who already replied through your invitation link, that guest is checked in instead — no second person is added. If it matches someone already on your guest list, the kiosk asks: check that guest in instead, or Add a new person when it really is someone else with the same name.

If your event has a capacity cap and it's already full, the kiosk asks "at capacity — add anyway?" rather than refusing. You're at the door; you decide. Walk-ins count toward the cap like anyone else.

Setup's Front desk section tells you exactly which of these applies to your event — whether a cap is set, and what it is.

Door passes

Door passes are optional and off by default — switch them on under Settings → The door. Once they're on, every guest who replies Yes and is on your guest list gets a personal door pass in their confirmation email. From the kiosk's Front desk you can open or paste a guest's pass to check their whole party in without hunting for a name. It's the fastest doorway there is. See The check-in kiosk.

Showing guests their table

When a guest checks in — on the kiosk, on their phone, or with a door pass — the screen shows their table and where the rest of their party sits, once you've released tables. If no seat is set aside yet, it tells them the host will point them to one. If two guests have exactly the same name at different tables, the lookup sends them to your welcome desk to sort it out.

When the wifi drops

Venue wifi is famously unreliable, and a queue at the door is the worst possible moment for it. So check-in keeps working anyway.

If the connection goes while a guest taps their name, a pass is being scanned, or a walk-in is being added, the action is saved on the device and the door keeps moving. (Searching for a name needs a connection, and a check-in saved offline can't show the guest their table.) A calm amber line appears telling whoever's on the door how many are saved and that they'll sync when the signal is back. The moment it returns, the saved actions send themselves, oldest first, the line changes to Syncing…, and then it settles on a green All synced.

Two things worth knowing, because they're the reasons this is safe rather than scary:

• Nothing is double-counted. Checking a guest in twice keeps their first arrival time — it never creates a second arrival, even when two helpers tap the same guest at once. A walk-in that's saved offline carries a stamp that stops it being added twice when it finally sends.
• Nothing is lost. The saved actions live on the device itself, so closing the lid or locking the tablet doesn't drop them. They wait.

You don't have to do anything to turn this on. It's how the front desk behaves.

The record

Every door action is written to your event's audit trail — check-ins, walk-ins, and undos — with the time it happened. Read the whole trail in the audit log on the Live side, newest first. It survives the night, so "when did the Hendersons actually arrive?" has an answer the next morning.

Common questions

Do my helpers need accounts? No. Nobody working the door signs into anything. They use the kiosk you've already opened and locked.

Can a guest wander into the front desk? It's deliberately kept away from the guest tiles — it sits with the host controls at the bottom of the kiosk, labelled Staff only. And once the kiosk is locked, tapping Front desk asks for the host passcode or a helper's staff PIN before it opens (a helper's PIN also logs them in at the door). Unlocked, it opens straight away. See Event Day mode.

A guest's name won't come up in search. Search finds guests on your list, guests who replied through your shared invitation link, and plus-ones you've named. If they're none of those, add them as a walk-in and they're on the list and checked in at once.

I added a walk-in twice by mistake. The front desk now asks first: if the name you type is already on your guest list, it offers to check that guest in instead, or to Add a new person. If a duplicate did slip in (say, a slightly different spelling), two guests with that name will be on your list. Remove the extra from your Guests tab; see Removing and duplicate guests.

Does offline check-in work on any device? It works in the phone or tablet's normal browser — nothing to install. Saved actions are stored on the device itself, so they survive a locked screen; they send themselves once that device is back online with the kiosk page open.

What if the wifi never comes back? The saved actions stay on that device. Bring it back online later — even at home the next day — with the kiosk page open, and they send themselves then. Your arrival list catches up.

Related articles

• The check-in kiosk
• The Event Day tab — set it up, then run the day from it
• Event Day mode — your welcome desk on a tablet
• Max capacity and the waitlist