Front of House is one web page per event-night: a roster you can search, a camera scanner, a till, and the counts. The Door Terminal app is that same page in a native shell, and the only thing the shell adds is payment and card-reader hardware. Nothing your staff learn in one is different in the other.
Amara Okafor
General Admission · #10428
Dev Patel
Guest list · door pickup
Rosa Lim
Three-night pass
Sam Reyes
General Admission · order refunded
Expected
128
Checked in
91
Remaining
37
Door takings
$240
An illustration of the Door tab. Ticketed nights get Door, Scan, Sell and Overview; community nights get Attendance, Scan and Overview.
Two of them are for your staff and one is for the person standing in front of them.
Staff, in any browser
One page per event-night. The tabs change with the night: a ticketed date gets Door, Scan, Sell and Overview, and a non-ticketed community date gets Attendance, Scan and Overview instead. No install, no device to buy.
Staff, on Android or iOS
The same console, wrapped so it can reach a card reader. The app recognises itself and switches the console to a full-height point-of-sale layout with a clock and no site chrome — no query string, no second login, and the login survives the app being closed.
Attendees, unattended
A full-screen sign-in page a walk-in drives themselves: tap a card, scan a ticket, look themselves up, or register as a newcomer. It returns to the start after 90 seconds and wipes anything typed.
Four steps, doors to close
Staff sign in and see the venues they can work a door for — and if there is only one, that step is skipped. Then tonight's and the next published dates, straight from the calendar. Nobody types a URL.
Search by name, email, ticket number, or the phone number on the order. One tap checks a person in. Camera scanning and card taps live on the next tab over.
Ring up any ticket type, including pay-what-you-can, and take cash, card or an external payment. A sale made within an hour of doors checks the buyer in as part of the sale.
Expected, checked in, remaining, and cash taken at the door. All four are counted from tonight's tickets, so the panel and the roster cannot disagree, and a ticketed attendee is one head rather than two.
Most of this exists because a door queue found the edge case first.
Cancelled and expired tickets stay on the list, with a reason and no check-in button, so a volunteer can tell someone their order was refunded instead of saying "there is no such ticket". Guest-list door pickups sit on the same list as the paid tickets.
The Scan tab opens the device camera and reads rotating ticket codes or a plain ticket number. A ticket for another night, another session, or a cancelled order is refused with the specific reason on screen, not a red cross.
A three-night pass scans in on every night it covers, and counts as a head on each of them. Nobody has to remember which night a ticket was bought under.
On a night split into parts — a matinee and an evening, a workshop then a show — staff can pin the door to one session and override the clock. The roster buttons and the camera scanner both admit that session, so two people working the same door cannot admit different halves of the night.
Owed, on file, or checked by a named member of staff — on the roster row and on every scan result. Stamping "I checked this signature" records who and when. There is deliberately no un-stamp at the door; a mistake is corrected by an administrator. Nights that need no signature show no chip at all.
A card-present sale at the door runs on the same connected-account rail as your online sales, with the same fee logic, and issues the ticket when the charge succeeds. The payment is set up before the tap, so a refusal cancels the order rather than leaving held seats stranded.
A date that sells nothing swaps the ticket roster for a searchable attendance list, with staff entry for walk-ins. Same console, same tabs, no invented ticket type just to count heads.
The door screen is served from us, not built into the app, so a fix ships the day it is written. Only hardware changes need a new build on your devices.
The console is identical everywhere. The hardware underneath it is not, and the differences are Apple's and Stripe's rather than ours. Read this before you buy devices.
| Device | Taking a card | Reading a membership card | Scanning a ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Android phone or tablet Door Terminal app | Tap to Pay. The device itself is the reader — no extra hardware. A Bluetooth Stripe Reader M2 also works if you already own one. | Yes, on the device — in Android Chrome, or with the device running in companion mode. | Yes, the device camera. |
| iPhone or iPad Door Terminal app | A Bluetooth Stripe Reader M2, paired once and remembered per station by serial and a nickname, so two iPads at two doors never grab each other's reader. Tap to Pay is not available to us on iOS. | Not on the device. Needs a paired Android device in companion mode, linked with a six-digit code your staff generate. | Yes, the device camera. |
| Any laptop or tablet Browser, no app | Cash and external payments are recorded as normal. A card sale sends the buyer to hosted Stripe checkout — that is an online transaction at online rates, not a card-present one. | Android Chrome only, on a device with NFC. | Yes, the device camera. |
Android 11 or newer, Developer Options switched off, location permission granted, an unmodified device with Google services, and Stripe Terminal enabled on your account in a supported country. A Bluetooth M2 additionally needs a Terminal location on your Stripe account. Card sales need your Stripe account to be able to receive payments, and a total of at least 50 cents.
You supply the devices — a Tap-to-Pay-capable Android handset, or an iPad and a Stripe Reader M2. We do not sell hardware and we do not take a cut of it. The app is not a public store download either: we set your team's devices up and get your Stripe account ready for them. Get in touch to start that.
Check-in, ticket sales and card payments all talk to the server as they happen. Nothing is queued on the device to be sent later, and the app says plainly when it cannot reach us rather than accepting work it might lose. Plan for a network at the door the way you would for a card machine.
Stand a tablet on a plinth and people check themselves in. Four ways in: tap a membership card, scan the ticket on their phone, find themselves by email or phone number, or register as a newcomer on the spot.
Welcome — please sign in
Thursday Night Showcase
Tap your membership card
Hold it against the reader
Returns to this screen after 90 seconds
The most interesting thing at the door, and the piece with the biggest caveat. Both halves below are true.
An iPad cannot read a membership card, so a spare Android phone runs the app in companion mode and does the reading for it. Staff pair the two with a six-digit code that is single-use and expires in five minutes; the phone's credential lasts 30 days and can do exactly one thing — relay a tap. The phone never receives any member data: it shows a green or red result with a sound, and the person's details appear on the paired screen instead. Card checks happen once, on the server. This is part of the setup we do with you rather than something you switch on alone.
Three separate ways in, because a Saturday volunteer is not an administrator and should not have to become one.
Administrators, managers and staff of the organization can work any of its doors.
Anyone you have given the operations dashboard or shift management to, whatever their job title.
Anyone rostered on a shift covering that event today — and only today. Access follows the schedule, so a volunteer sees tonight's door and nothing else, and you do not have to remember to take it away again.
Opening the console is not a pass for the evening. Each check-in, scan, waiver stamp, session pin and pairing re-checks permission at the moment it happens, so revoking someone mid-shift takes effect on their very next tap rather than whenever they next reload.
A console will not open a date that does not belong to the event it was opened for, and a scan is always resolved against the night on screen rather than whatever the device sends. Organizations sharing a platform never see each other's rosters or takings.
Better to read these now than at 19:40 on a Friday.
The attendee kiosk resets after 90 seconds. A staff console does not — it keeps the last result on screen until somebody touches it. Treat a door terminal like a till drawer, not like a public screen.
Venue rentals and paid dates whose tickets Eventbrite sold are left out on purpose — that sale is not ours to redeem. Free dates and community dates always appear. The list shows up to 60 upcoming published dates.
When a discounted comp still owes something at the door, the console writes down cash, card or other and moves the queue along. It does not put that through Stripe. Only the Sell tab's card path actually takes a payment.
A browser has no card reader, so the buyer is sent to hosted Stripe checkout. That is fine on a tablet you hand over, but it is not a card-present transaction and it carries online rates.
An organization whose plan does not include the door surface gets a made-up sample roster so it can see the shape of the thing — and only when the real list is genuinely empty and nobody has searched, so a search can never replace real people with invented ones.
Start in a browser on whatever you already own — the console is the same one the app runs. When you want card payments on the device, we will set your team up.