Running door check-in on phones: a setup checklist

Staffing math first

A phone scan takes three to five seconds when it works, ten when it doesn't. Call it 300 people per scanner per hour, sustained. Count your expected peak arrival window — usually the 45 minutes before the headline moment — and divide. A 1,200-person event where most people arrive in that window needs four scanning stations at peak, not the two that felt fine at 10am.

The night-before checklist

• Battery plan. A phone scanning continuously with the screen on loses 20-30% an hour. One power bank per station, cabled, from the start — not when the phone hits 15%.
• Connectivity fallback. Test the actual doorway, not the lobby. If venue Wi-Fi is weak at the door, decide NOW whether phones run on cellular, a hotspot, or an offline mode — and write the choice down where door staff will see it.
• Brightness and grip. Screens at full brightness (attendee phones with dimmed screens are the slow scans), and a lanyard or grip per device. A dropped phone is a closed station.
• The unknown-person path. Decide what staff do when a code will not scan or a name is not on the list. The answer is a person and a place (“step to the side table, Dana resolves it”), never “figure it out at the front of the line.”

The volunteer dry run

Fifteen minutes before doors, run the drill: each volunteer scans three test codes — one valid, one already-used, one that fails. They should see what each outcome looks like on the screen before a line is watching them. The already-used case is the one that matters: at a busy door the same ticket shows up twice constantly (screenshots, forwarded emails, groups), and staff need to know whether that is fraud or Tuesday. Usually it is Tuesday.

During: watch the rate, not the line

The line length lies — it reflects arrival bursts. The number that tells you whether to open another station is scans per minute per station falling while the line grows. Assign one person to watch the count, not a door.