Who’s on site, and the fire register

Each booking has a Check in button once you open it, and the On site page lists everyone checked in and not yet checked out. Print it and it is your fire register.

It asks how many actually turned up. A booking says twenty-four in March and twenty-two walk through the gate; the second number is the one a fire crew needs. The register says which of the two it is showing for each group — counted in or as booked — because a figure from a form filled in months ago is a different kind of fact from one somebody counted at the gate.

Nothing checks anybody out automatically, and that is deliberate. A group that stays an extra night would disappear from a date-based register at midnight with nobody told — and a register that leaves people off is far worse than one that lists somebody who has already gone. So a group past its departure date stays on the list, marked still checked in, until a person says otherwise.

Groups due today that nobody has checked in are listed underneath the register, not on it. The register is people somebody has actually seen; putting an expected group on it would be exactly the false entry the rest of this is designed to avoid.

Anyone who can see the site can open it, including somebody who cannot see your customer list. That is a deliberate exception: it is not the customer list, it is a few rows about people who are here tonight, and a phone number withheld from whoever is standing in a field at 2am would be no use to anybody.

Message everybody on site. At the top of the On site page, write a subject and a message and it goes by email to the leader of every group checked in — a storm warning, a fire ban, the water off. Tick the box to include the groups due today who haven’t checked in yet. It comes from your campsite’s name and replies come to you. It isn’t marketing, so it goes to everybody whatever they’ve agreed to. A group with no email address on file is named after sending, so you know who to ring. Anybody who can take bookings can send one, and the last few are listed with who sent them. Each also shows on its booking under the emails sent.

People at an event or on a course. Ticket holders checked in on an event’s check-in link are on the register too, marked with the event they’re at, and counted in the total — on a bonfire night, they’re the people on site. They come off when they’re checked out on the link, and are flagged the next day if nobody did. People marked Here on a course’s register are on it the same way, one row per booking, until they’re marked gone home.

Undo is for a check-in pressed by mistake and is not the same as checking out — “they left” and “that never happened” are different things, and only one of them should put a departure time on the record. Enquiries and cancelled bookings cannot be checked in at all.