EventMann

Door check-in is where a ticketing platform is judged. Nobody in a queue that is not moving cares how good your analytics dashboard is, and the entrance is the one part of your event where a software problem becomes a visible, physical queue of annoyed people. It is worth understanding how it works before the doors open rather than at 19:05 on the night.

Every ticket has its own QR code

A booking for four people is not one ticket with a quantity of four. It is four tickets, each with its own code, embedded in the PDF and in the confirmation email. That matters at the door: a group can arrive separately, and each person can be admitted independently without the rest of the party being marked present.

Scanning a code validates it against your event and marks it used. The same code cannot be waved through a second time — the second scan is refused and tells your staff it has already been admitted, along with when. That is the difference between a ticket and a picture of a ticket.

The scanner app

Door staff use a dedicated scanner app rather than the website. It talks to a small, purpose-built API instead of loading full web pages, which is what keeps it usable on the kind of connection venues actually have — a single overloaded access point behind a bar, or a phone on mobile data in a basement.

Access is granted per event, not by job title. You give a specific person the right to scan a specific event, and that is the entire extent of what their login can do. When the event is over you take it back. There is no shared device password to rotate and no former volunteer left holding a working key.

Who can scan, and what else they can see

Check-in permission is part of the same role system as everything else on the platform. This is worth being concrete about, because it is the part that is usually done badly elsewhere. A door volunteer with check-in permission cannot:

see your revenue, payouts or fee breakdown;
export your attendee list;
see or touch any of your other events;
issue a refund, or change a ticket price.

They can scan the event they were given and look up a booking on it. The permission is checked on the server every time, not just hidden from the interface — an important distinction, because a hidden button is not a permission.

Manual look-up, because phones die

Screens crack, batteries go flat, screenshots blur, and somebody always turns up having deleted the email. Staff can find a booking by its reference or by attendee name and check it in by hand. Reference look-up is not case-sensitive, so a reference read aloud and typed in works whether or not the person capitalises it.

This turns a broken QR code from an argument at the door into a ten-second detour. It is also why the manual path is a first-class part of the app rather than an admin escape hatch on a laptop somewhere behind the desk.

What you get afterwards

Every check-in is recorded with a timestamp. Afterwards you can see actual attendance against tickets sold, which is usually a more interesting number than either one on its own:

Sold vs. attended tells you your real no-show rate, which is what you should be overselling against next time — if you choose to.
Arrival times tell you whether you need more staff at the start or a wider door. A queue at 19:00 and empty scanners from 19:30 is a staffing shape, not a capacity problem.
Per-ticket-type attendance tells you whether the people who paid the most actually turned up.

Practical advice for the night

Three things that are cheap before and expensive during:

Add your door staff a day early, not at the door. Account setup at the entrance while a queue forms is the single most common self-inflicted delay.
Test one scan on the real device, on the real network, in the real room. Venue wifi that works in the empty afternoon can behave very differently with four hundred phones in the room.
Agree what happens on a refusal. A refused scan usually means a duplicate or the wrong event, not fraud. Decide in advance who is allowed to override and where those people stand, so that decision is not being made in front of the person it concerns.

Attendance evidence has one more use worth knowing about: check-in data is one of the signals that releases your payout after the event. Scanning is not just an operational nicety — it is part of how the platform establishes that your event actually took place.

Checking in attendees at the door