Access control
Access control is the few seconds in which a ticket stops being a promise and becomes a person standing inside your building.
Access control is the checking of entry rights at the entrance: confirming that a ticket is genuine, that it is valid for this event and this moment, and that it has not already been used. It produces a live attendance figure as a by-product, which is what makes it useful beyond security.
The maths of a queue
Everything at a gate is arithmetic. If three hundred people arrive in the twenty minutes before the start and one check takes five seconds, a single point of entry cannot clear them before curtain-up. Two points halve the wait; a third rarely helps as much as people expect.
The variable you control is the time per person. Anything that adds a question, a search or a conversation multiplies across the whole queue. Ticketing for village halls fails far more often on this than on anything technical.
The door list and its edge cases
Every event has exceptions: the performer's family, the sponsor, the person whose email never arrived. A door list that only exists in the head of one committee member becomes a bottleneck the moment that person steps away.
The other edge case is re-entry. If people may step outside for air or for a cigarette, decide in advance how that is handled, because deciding it on the spot with fifteen people waiting produces an inconsistent answer.
The entrance with Passavo
Checking is a scan with a phone, with a plain green, amber or red answer and a sound, so a helper does not have to read anything in the dark. Several people can check at the same entrance at once, and every scan lands in the same overview.
Guests without their ticket can be found by name in today's list and admitted from there. While the doors are open, your dashboard shows how many of today's tickets have been scanned.
Also searched for as
- door list
- entry control
- admission control
- checking tickets
Common questions
How many people can scan at once?
Several at once. Every device sends its scans to the same overview, and a code shown at two entrances only counts once; the second scan is recorded as a duplicate.
What if someone has no ticket at all?
You look them up by name in the scanning app, or you sell them a ticket on the spot at the till. Either way they end up in the same overview.