06 · Kiosk (a tablet on the counter)

A kiosk is a spare tablet, left out where your team or your customers can reach it, running one screen and nothing else. It is not the back office. Nobody signs in on it, nobody can browse to your finances from it, and it can only ever see the one business it was paired to.

You set one up once, in a minute, and then leave it alone.

There are two kinds, and you choose which when you pair the tablet:

You can run both at once on two tablets. Pair each one separately.

Everything on this page is at Settings → Kiosk. Settings is under your business name, top-left.

There is a second thing called a kiosk, and it is not this one. On the Check-in page there is a Kiosk button that puts your own signed-in browser into a full-screen register for one class or session, for a staff member standing at the door with a laptop. It ends when you select Exit kiosk. This page is about a dedicated tablet you leave out, with nobody signed in on it, covering everything happening today. If you are pairing a tablet, you want this page. See Bookings for the other one.

1. Setting up a tablet

Have the tablet in your hand for this. It takes about a minute.

1. On your computer, open Settings → Kiosk.
2. Under Pair a device, choose Staff kiosk or Visitor check-in.
3. Give it a Device name if you like, Front door iPad, Back office iPad. You will thank yourself later when there are three of them in the list. It is optional, and unnamed tablets show as Kiosk tablet.
4. Select Generate code.
5. Point the tablet's camera at the square on your screen. Open the camera app, hold it up, tap the link it offers. That is the whole job: the tablet opens your kiosk and pairs itself, with nothing to type.

The code beside the square works once and expires after 15 minutes. If you walk away and come back to a stale one, just select Generate code again.

No camera, or a camera that will not read it? Type it instead. The address is printed under the square, with a Copy link button if it is easier to send it to the tablet in a message. Open that address on the tablet and enter the six characters.

Make it full screen

Once it is paired, add it to the tablet's home screen and it opens like an app, with no address bar: Share then Add to Home Screen on an iPad, or the browser menu then Install app on Android. The icon and name are your business's, not ours.

It stays paired

A paired tablet stays paired for a year, and through being switched off, restarted and put in a drawer. You never have to do this again unless you unpair it or clear the tablet's browser data.

2. The list of paired tablets

Paired tablets shows every one, its kind (Staff or Visitor), and when it was last used, so a tablet somebody has quietly stopped using is visible.

Unpair ends it. The tablet drops back to the pairing screen the next time anybody touches it, and the old code cannot bring it back. Use it when a tablet is lost, sold, or leaves the building.

A lost tablet is the reason to check this list. Unpairing it is immediate and it is the only thing you need to do: there is no account on the tablet to disable, and nothing on it that survives being unpaired.

3. What shows on a staff kiosk

What shows on the kiosk lists every tile available to you. Tick the ones you want, move them up and down with the arrows into the order that suits the room, and rename any of them if your team calls it something else. The name you type is what appears on the tablet.

Only tools you have switched on appear in the list. Turn on the Roster module and a clock tile appears here; turn on Shopping and a shopping tile appears. If the list is empty, you have no modules on yet that have anything to offer a tablet.

Tiles you may see, depending on what you run:

A new tile we add later appears next to its relatives, already ticked, rather than at the bottom of the list where nobody would notice it. The order here is the order on the tablet.

4. How your team clocks in

Under How staff clock in, two choices, and the difference matters:

• Tap your name. Simplest. Everyone rostered today is a button. Anyone in the room could tap a colleague's name, though.
• Personal PIN. Each person types their own PIN, so nobody can clock a workmate in or out.

Choose Personal PIN and a list of your team appears underneath, with Set PIN beside each one. Set them before you tell people to start using the kiosk, or the first person to try it cannot clock on. PINs are stored scrambled and are never shown again, to you or to anyone. If somebody forgets theirs, set a new one.

The same choice decides who gets named on a walk-in taken at the tablet, so Personal PIN means the name on that booking is proven rather than tapped.

Clock in/out shows only staff rostered today is on by default, which keeps the list short and honest. There is a someone else option on the tablet for when a person comes in to cover unrostered, so nobody is ever stuck.

Somebody with no login can still clock on

A team member added with No login, and even one with no email address at all, clocks in and out on the kiosk with their own PIN like anyone else, and their hours reach timesheets and payroll the same way. The kiosk is often the only way those people can record a shift, so this is the setting that makes them payable.

The kiosk can be the only place someone clocks

Whether a person may clock in on their own phone or computer is a permission, not a kiosk setting: Clock in and out on their own phone or computer, at Team → Staff list → Roles & permissions. Turn it off for a role and those people must use the tablet. That is a deliberate choice some businesses want, and the kiosk is what makes it workable.

5. Shopping list, on the tablet

If you show the shopping tile, two switches decide how much a tablet in a shared room is trusted with it:

• Let staff add to the shopping list. Off makes the tile read-only.
• Let staff tick items off. Off means staff can add but only managers remove.

Both are on to begin with. Turn the second one off if you have had a list quietly emptied.

6. The lock screen

For a staff kiosk you can put a calm, branded cover over the screen when nobody is using it.

• Lock after no activity: never, or after 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 or 30 minutes.
• Require a PIN to unlock, 4 to 8 digits. Without it, any tap unlocks.

Be clear-eyed about what this is. It is a privacy cover, not a hard lock. It hides the screen from the room; a determined person could reload the page. For a tablet that genuinely must not leave this one screen, also turn on the tablet's own single-app lockdown: Guided Access on an iPad, Screen Pinning on Android. That is the part that stops somebody wandering off into Safari.

Visitor kiosks always stay open, because a check-in screen nobody can wake up is a queue at your front door.

7. The visitor kiosk

Paired as Visitor check-in, the tablet shows Welcome, check yourself in and two ways to do it: scan your QR, or find your name. Either way it congratulates them by first name and resets itself for the next person.

Show the "find my name" list decides whether the name list exists at all. Turn it off and the tablet goes straight to the camera, scan-only, and no guest names ever appear on the unattended screen. That is the right setting for a tablet left in a public doorway.

When the list is on, it shows first name and last initial only, enough to find yourself and not enough to be a guest list somebody could read off the counter.

8. Who can set this up

Setting up kiosks needs the manage settings permission, so owners and managers. Nobody using the tablet needs any permission or account at all, which is the point of it.

The tablet itself can only ever reach the one business it was paired to. It has no way into the back office, no way to another business, and everything it shows is checked against its own pairing every time, not trusted from the tablet.

Troubleshooting

Related: Roster & timesheets · Bookings · Shopping list · Safety & cleaning · Roles & permissions · Security & your data