Gate Mode: checking cars in at the entrance

At the entrance of a paid show, three kinds of car pull up and they look identical from the outside. One registered online and paid weeks ago. One registered but still owes the entry fee. One has never heard of your show and wants in. The registration table could sort them out, but it sits a hundred feet past the point where money changes hands, which is the whole problem.

Gate Mode is the page your gate volunteer opens to answer that question one car at a time.

What a gate pass is

When someone registers online, their confirmation email now carries a personal gate pass: a QR code with a short typed code printed underneath it. Nothing to print. Most drivers pull it up on their phone at the gate the way they would a boarding pass, and the ones who print the email work fine too.

The short code matters more than it looks. It is the fallback for every situation where a camera will not cooperate, and on a bright Saturday morning that is a real percentage of cars.

Turning it on

Gate check-in lives under Show day tools, alongside the registration table, the kiosk, judging, the awards script, and live results. It earns its keep once your show collects an entry fee, which you set under Settings, then Registration.

Send your gate volunteer the link before show day and ask them to add it to their home screen. On an iPhone that is the share button, then “Add to Home Screen”. The gate then opens full screen from that icon, with no browser chrome and no address bar to fat-finger while a line builds.

The three verdicts

Every scan returns one full-screen answer, color coded, in letters you can read across a car hood. That is the entire interaction design: the volunteer should never have to interpret anything.

Green means paid. Wave the car through.

Amber means collect. The screen shows the exact amount owed and a single button to mark it paid once the cash is in your hand. Tap it after you take the money, not before. If your show takes cards at the gate, this screen is also where the pay-by-card QR appears; more on that below.

Blue means already checked in. This is the quiet one that saves you. A pass scanned twice, a driver who circled the lot and came back, a volunteer who lost their place in the line: all of them land here instead of double counting or double charging.

Under each verdict you get the driver’s name, their car number, the make and model, and the pass code, so you can confirm out loud that you are looking at the right car before you wave it on.

Undo, and the next car

Two buttons sit under every verdict: undo, and next car. Undo reverses the check-in you just recorded, which is the button you want when a volunteer taps ahead of the cash or scans the wrong windshield. The cost of a mistake at the gate is a second, not an argument at the awards table three hours later.

When the camera will not cooperate

Below the scan button there is a field that takes either the short code from the pass or a last name. Type a few letters, tap “Find them”, and matching entrants appear with their status shown next to each one. Picking a person opens the same verdict screen a scan would have.

Use this for the driver who deleted the confirmation email, the cracked screen that will not hold focus, and the passenger who registered under a spouse’s name. It is not a degraded path. It is just the other way in.

Cars with no pass at all

Drive-ups used to be the thing that stopped a gate line cold, because handling one meant leaving the gate or writing something on paper you would have to key in later.

In Gate Mode a drive-up is a short form: take the day-of fee, type the car’s make and model, tap once. What exists a second later is a real entry, already paid, already checked in, already carrying a car number. Your registration table sees it the moment the driver walks up, so the card-writing crew can start lettering a windshield card without asking anyone what happened at the gate.

No receipt to hand over, and nobody asking “did this one pay?” at noon.

Drive-ups paying plastic instead of cash get their own button on the same form, covered next.

And when the line backs up faster than even the short form allows, skip the form. Take the cash, wave the car through, and tell the driver to stop at the registration table. The kiosk there has an “I paid at the gate” button that runs the full registration and records the entry as paid at the gate and checked in, so the money you grabbed in the line still matches your cash box when you count it that night. The gate keeps moving and nothing gets written on paper.

Taking cards at the gate

Cash is one tap, and it stays that way. If you also want to take cards in the car line, turn on Take card payments at the gate, under Settings, then Registration, in the Show day section. The switch ships off, and it needs your payment account connected, because the money moves through your own provider like every other payment on the platform.

With it on, the amber collect screen adds a QR code beside the cash button. The driver scans it with their own phone and lands in your checkout with the right amount already set, which for a gate entry is your day-of fee; your volunteer’s phone never leaves their hand. When the driver’s screen says paid, tap the refresh button under the QR and the verdict turns green. That refresh asks your payment provider directly rather than waiting for anything to arrive, so the answer comes back while the car is still in front of you.

For a drive-up, the second button on the drive-up form creates the entry first and opens the same QR screen. Until the payment goes through, that entry sits as pending rather than paid, so a driver who changes their mind and pulls out of line never leaves a paid record with no money behind it, and never burns a car number. Once the payment lands, check them in and wave them through like anyone else.

Reading the arrived counter

At the top of the gate page a counter reads how many cars have arrived against how many registered, and it climbs all morning. When somebody on the radio asks how it is going, that number is the answer.

Worth knowing what it is actually counting. The denominator is your registered field, so a morning heavy on drive-ups can push arrivals past what you expected, and a show with lots of no-shows will sit under it all day. The number is a live attendance count, which is more than most shows have ever had before lunch, but it is not a prediction.

The crew link: volunteers without logins

The person on your gate at seven in the morning is a volunteer, a spouse, a scout working a service badge. They should not need an account, and now they do not. The gate page has a Day-of crew card: create the crew link and a QR code appears. A volunteer points their phone camera at it once and they are working.

What a crew phone can do is deliberately small: scan passes, look cars up, read the verdict screens, check in a car that is already paid, and read a windshield card list with the car number printed large for hand-lettering. What it cannot do is the point: no collecting money, no undo, no creating drive-ups, no settings. All of that stays on a phone with a real staff login, and the app enforces it on the server, not by hiding buttons.

When the day ends, or when a phone goes missing, press New crew link. Every phone that scanned the old one is out instantly, and the change lands in your show’s change log like any other sensitive action.

What Gate Mode does not do

It does not hold or process money itself. A card payment at the gate runs through your own connected payment account, the same place online registrations settle, and cash stays in your cash box. Gate Mode records the status either way and never touches the funds.

It also does not replace the registration table. The table still writes windshield cards, fixes the class somebody picked wrong, and handles the conversations that need a human and a clipboard. Gate Mode exists to keep those conversations from happening in a line of idling cars.

A sensible way to staff it

One phone at the gate handles a steady arrival rate comfortably. If your show opens with a rush, which most do, add more phones: every volunteer who scans the crew QR is on the same entry list, so a car checked in on one phone shows as already checked in on the rest. Keep one staff login at the gate for money and corrections; the crew phones handle the scanning.

Before gates open, have whoever is working the gate scan their own test entry once. It confirms the link works, the camera permission is granted, and the phone is on the right show, which are the three things that go wrong at five to eight in the morning.

Keep reading

• Check-in and cards
• Judged scoring
• Payments and payouts
• Recurring shows
• Spectator voting