Check-in and windshield cards: running the registration table

By eight in the morning the registration table is the busiest square yard of your show. Two different jobs happen there, with two different rhythms. A pre-registered car arrives, someone finds its printed card in the stack, hands it over and checks the car in. A walk-up registers on the kiosk and someone writes a card from scratch. Car Show HQ gives each job its own screen: the Registrants page for the printed stack, and the Card desk for the cards that still need writing. Both are in Show day tools, and the Card desk is the first button on the Registrants toolbar.

What check-in records

Every entry carries a status: Pending payment, Confirmed, Checked in, or Cancelled. The green Check in button on each row moves a confirmed entry to Checked in, and the same button becomes Undo check-in afterward, so a mis-tap costs a second rather than an argument. Payment lives in its own column next to status, because they are different facts: whether the money arrived and whether the car did.

The click does not have to be yours. Every confirmation email on a show without Gate Mode carries a check-in QR code and link; the driver scans it at the table, taps once, and is checked in, then tells you their name for the card. The Car Number is not on that page, since the link can be opened anywhere. The kiosk has a second door, Already registered? Check in here: name or email, tap the car, checked in, with the Car Number shown so you can pull the card from the stack.

The two meet in one place. An entry still at Pending payment will not check in, and the fix is the Mark paid button that appears on any row that owes money. When the driver hands you cash at the table, press it once: the payment is recorded, the entry confirms, its car number is assigned on the spot, and the confirmation email goes out. Then check them in.

Finding a car fast

The search box takes a name, an email, a make, or a model, and filters the list as you type. Type digits and it switches to car number lookup instead, matched exactly: 42 finds car 42, but 4 on its own finds nothing, so type the whole number.

Two dropdowns filter by status and payment. Unfinished checkouts, meaning people who opened the payment page and never paid, stay out of the default list along with withdrawn entries, so show morning starts with a clean list; a count under the table says how many are hidden, and a name search still finds them.

New arrivals do not interrupt this page. They go to the Card desk, which is the next section, so the person working the printed stack is never distracted by a walk-up and the person writing cards never has to scroll a list.

The Card desk

The Card desk is a queue with a done state, which is what keeps it readable at ten in the morning. It lists the cars that arrived with no card in your printed stack: kiosk walk-ups, and anyone who registered online after you last printed the numbered cards. Oldest first, with the car number in letters big enough to read from the next chair, the car, the owner, the class, how they arrived and how long they have been waiting. The list refreshes itself every few seconds, so a walk-up who just finished on the kiosk is on it before they reach the table.

Write the card, tap Card written, and the car leaves the list, checked in. That one tap is the check-in for a walk-up, so there is no separate click to forget. Undo lives under Recently written for the fat finger, and Print card sits beside the button for tables with a printer. Printing the Numbered cards PDF is what tells the desk where your stack ends: the page says when you last printed, and anyone who registered after that is listed beside the walk-ups. A show that never printed numbered cards sees walk-ups only.

When the click was forgotten anyway

By default a car stays on the ballot whether or not it was checked in, so a driver whose card was handed over without the click is never turned away from the vote. Two signals keep that honest. If a car is collecting votes without a check-in, the dashboard says how many, the Results page lists them before you finalize, and the Registrants status filter has a Getting votes, never checked in choice that shows exactly those rows. And once voting is open, the dashboard counts the registered cars still waiting on a check-in and offers two buttons: Review, or Check them all in. Neither signal appears on a show that does not check cars in at all.

How car numbers work

Numbers are assigned when an entry confirms, not when the form is submitted. Someone who opens checkout and walks away never burns a number, so your sequence stays tight even on a show with a messy online window.

The sequence starts wherever you say. First car number lives under Settings, then Registration, in the Car numbers section: set it to 100 and your field runs 100, 101, 102. A second switch there lets registrants pick their own number for an optional fee, and a taken number can never be picked. If a pick was claimed by someone else before the payment confirmed, the entrant gets the next free number and their row notes what they asked for, so you can make it right with them at the table.

Two limits are worth knowing before your numbering matters. There is no control for editing a number once it is assigned, so settle First car number before entries start confirming. And a cancelled entry keeps its number reserved on purpose: a printed card with that number may already exist, and two cars answering to number 12 on show day is a worse problem than a gap in your sequence.

One more thing that surprises new organizers: entrants never see their number before the show. Confirmation emails and screens leave it out deliberately and tell the driver to collect their card at check-in. The number is a staff tool, and your table is where it gets issued.

The two card PDFs

Above the list sit two downloads, and they solve different problems.

Blank cards PDF is a single-page master. Print it once, then run as many copies as you want at the printer. The card has a large box to hand-write the car number, lines for name, year, make, model, and judging category, and a QR code that opens your show’s voting page. Because the QR is the same on every blank, you can print the stack weeks early.

Numbered cards PDF is one finished page per car that has a number, in number order. Each card prints the number huge, the year, make, and model under it, the owner’s name, the club if your form collects one, and the category as a small chip, with Open class standing in when a car has none. The QR on a numbered card goes one step further than the blank: it opens the ballot for that exact car, so a voter scans the glass and lands on the right entry. Every download regenerates the full current set, and it always covers every numbered car in the show, whatever filters the page has on.

Sponsor logos on the cards

Cards can carry sponsor logos, chosen sponsor by sponsor: on the Sponsors page, each sponsor has a Logo on every windshield card checkbox. One flagged sponsor prints as a wide banner across the bottom. Two flank the car number, one per side. Up to six fill the side columns in the order you have sorted the Sponsors page, and past six the sort order decides who makes the card. A flagged sponsor with no logo uploaded prints its name in large text instead, so paying for the glass never turns into a blank space.

The whole layout is black and white by design. These cards get printed on office printers the night before the show, and the design assumes exactly that.

Card stock and orientation

Cards print on 5 x 7 card stock. The Card orientation setting, under Settings, then Registration, in the Windshield cards section, turns the layout landscape or portrait to match the stock you bought. The same section has a switch to print your organization’s logo as the card header instead of the show name in text; it uses the logo from your Branding page, and without one the show name prints as usual.

Lost cards and reprints

When a card blows away or soaks through, every row on the Registrants page has a Print card button: it opens that one car’s numbered card in a print view with the print dialog already up, so a reprint is a tap and a few seconds at the table printer. No table printer? The blank stack still works: look the car up, copy the number onto a blank, and send it back to the glass. The Numbered cards PDF regenerates the whole set any time, which is the right tool the night before the show and the wrong one mid-morning. Print more blanks than you think you need; they are the cheapest insurance at the show.

Walk-ups without a pre-registration

The Registrants page itself has no add-an-entry form, on purpose. Walk-ups register themselves on the day-of kiosk, which is a page in a browser on any tablet, nothing to install. The first two buttons on the page’s toolbar open the kiosk and copy its link so you can set the tablet up in seconds.

On a free show, a kiosk entry confirms on the spot and gets its number immediately. On a paid show where the walk-up hands cash to your table instead of paying by card at the kiosk, the entry waits at Pending payment; your Mark paid press is what confirms it and assigns the number, right then. Either way the car appears on the Card desk seconds later with the number ready to copy onto a card. The kiosk shows the walk-up their number on its last screen so they can tell the table which card is theirs, and nowhere else.

Who can work the table

Checking cars in requires a login. Invite your table volunteers from the Staff page with the Staff role, which is built for exactly this job: a staff member can check in, undo a check-in, mark cash payments paid, fix a typo in a name or a car, resend a confirmation email, and print both card PDFs. What a staff member cannot do is also the point: no cancelling or deleting entries, no CSV import, no emailing your whole list, and no editing payment records beyond that one Mark paid button.

On a gate show there is a third key, lighter than both: the crew link. A volunteer who scans its QR can scan passes, check in cars that are already paid, and read a windshield card list built for hand-lettering, with the car number printed large next to the name, the vehicle, and the judging category. They cannot touch money, undo anything, or see settings, and pressing New crew link logs every one of those phones out at once.

The kiosk day code is a different key and it is not check-in access. The day code opens the self-serve kiosk and the voting station for the day, nothing more. A volunteer who only has the day code can help walk-ups register on the tablet; they cannot see your entry list or check anyone in. If the kiosk should not sit open to anyone holding the tablet, set the day code under Settings, then Registration, in the Show day section.

If you also run a gate

Shows that collect money at the entrance run Gate Mode, and it changes what your table does. A car through the gate arrives already paid, already checked in, and already numbered, including drive-ups the gate crew created on the spot, so the table’s job shifts from processing to finishing: letter the windshield card the moment the driver walks up, and collect the details the gate skipped. The status filter has a Paid, not finished registering choice that lists exactly those stragglers, and on a gate show the kiosk flips to a finish-your-entry screen that finds their record by car number or last name.

That kiosk screen carries a second button for the driver the gate never wrote down: “I paid at the gate”. When the line gets heavy, the gate crew can take the cash and wave the car through with no record at all; the driver stops at your table, taps that button, and fills in the full form themselves. The entry lands paid at the gate, checked in, and complete, so the cash box still reconciles and nobody re-queues at the gate to get a record made.

Closing online registration

Two ways to stop taking entries online, and both close everything at once: the Register button and the embedded form on the homepage, the register page, and the Register link in the site menu. Visitors who arrive after the cutoff see one line, “Pre-registration closed”, with the date when there was one, and under it whatever you wrote in Registration closed message on the Registration settings page: where to register at the gate, what it costs there. Leave that blank and the line stands alone.

The first way is a date. Settings, then Registration, then Registration closes. While the window is open, the show page and the register page count down to it (“Registration ends in 3 days”). Entries stop at that moment in the show’s own time zone, and the site says “Pre-registration closed September 2” from then on. The second way is the stage. On the dashboard, the next step after Registration open is now Close registration, which moves the show to a Registration closed stage; use it when there was never a date, or when you want to stop early to print cards. Either way the kiosk keeps taking walk-ups, because closing online entries must not turn away the car that drives in on Saturday morning, and Open voting is the next step when the day comes.

The night before

Four things, and the morning runs itself: download the Numbered cards PDF and print the set, which also tells the Card desk where your stack ends, run off a thick stack of blanks, invite everyone working the table as Staff, and set the kiosk day code. On a gate show, add a fifth: create the crew link and print its QR, so gate volunteers scan in instead of borrowing logins. Then put the tablet on the table, open Registrants on one laptop and the Card desk on the other, and watch the first car roll in.

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