Crew check-in and the on-site roster — Help

On the day, the question that matters most is not what is happening at 4pm. It is who is actually in the building. A crew of fifteen arrives across three hours in six different vehicles, and the only record of who has turned up is whoever you happen to have run into.

Check-in fixes that with one tap at each end. Crew mark themselves on site from the link they already have, and you get a live count and a named roster, which is the list you would want in your hand if the building had to be cleared.

Turning it on

Check-in is off by default and set per event, not per account. Open the event, and in its settings tick Check-in & check-out: a live on-site count for safety.

It is per event because most events do not need it. A three-supplier wedding does not, a 40-crew festival build does, and the toggle keeps the crew page clean for the ones that do not.

Nothing appears on anyone's screen until you tick it, and turning it on part way through the day is fine: the button appears on crew links without them reloading anything.

What crew see

On their share link, near the top of the page, there is a single large Check in button. One tap and it is done. There is no name picker, because the link already knows who they are, and no "are you sure?", because an accidental tap costs one tap to undo and the prompt was being paid for by everyone tapping deliberately with a case in the other hand.

Once they are in, the card turns green and says You're checked in, with the time they arrived, and offers Check out. Checking out does ask for confirmation, because that is the one you act on: it tells you to stop expecting them on site.

If you use 1pm for guests as well as crew, guests check in through exactly the same card.

Crew never see the roster. They see their own state and nothing else. Who else is on site is yours.

It works without signal. A loading dock with no bars is exactly where this gets used, so a tap made offline is held on the crew member's phone, the card updates straight away as though it had gone through, and it is sent as soon as the connection comes back. Nobody has to stand in the doorway waiting for a spinner.

There is one thing to know about that, and it matters because check-in doubles as a safety record: a tap made offline is timestamped when it reaches 1pm, not when it was tapped. Somebody who walked in at 6pm in a dead spot lands in the log at the time their phone found signal again. The live "who is on site" answer is right either way, which is what the roster is for, but if you are producing arrival times for a formal record, treat a reconnected entry as approximate.

One related piece of engineering worth knowing, because it prevents a nasty failure during a roll-call: the crew member's button sends the state it wants rather than flipping whatever it last saw. So a card left open on a phone since this morning cannot check somebody out by accident, and a double-tap cannot land as in-then-out.

What you see

On the event's planner page there is an On site now card with a count, and a View roster button.

The count is live. As people check in and out it updates by itself, with no refresh and no polling: you can leave the page open on a laptop at the door and watch the number climb through the build.

The roster opens in two lists:

On site now, most recent arrival first, each with the time they checked in. Most recent first is deliberate: during a build, the useful question is who has just walked in.
Not checked in, alphabetically. This covers both people who never checked in and people who have checked out again, and the ones who left carry the time they went.

You can also check anyone in or out from the roster yourself. That is there for the two situations that always come up: a marshal doing a physical head-count against the list, and the crew member whose phone died in the loading dock.

The number is a safety number, so it is built like one

Only crew with a working link are counted. The roster is everyone holding an active share link for the event. Revoke somebody's link and they leave both the count and the list, so a number you are reading out to a fire warden cannot be inflated by somebody who was removed from the job last week.
Nothing ever checks anybody out on its own. There is no end-of-day sweep and no timeout. Somebody who taps in and never taps out stays in the on-site list overnight, which is why the roster prints a bare time for anything that happened today and a time with a date for anything that did not. On a multi-day build, a row reading "7:15 am, 12 Mar" is last Tuesday's arrival still sitting there, not this morning's. If a count looks too high, that is the first thing to check.
Every check-in and check-out is logged, with the time, and with whether it was the crew member themselves or someone on your account doing it from the roster.
The log keeps the name as it was. It stores the person's name at the moment of the toggle, so renaming or removing a crew member later does not blank out the record of who was on site.
It is in your account data export, both the current state and the full log, so the record does not live only on a screen.

What it is not

It is not a timesheet. 1pm records that somebody was on site and when, not hours worked, breaks, or anything to bill from.
It does not notify you. There is no bell notification and no email when somebody checks in. Fifteen crew arriving would be fifteen interruptions during the busiest hour of your day. The live count is the notification.
It has nothing to do with crew statuses, which are about the booking (invited, confirmed, declined) rather than about today. Somebody can be confirmed for weeks and still not be in the building.
It does not touch the run of show. Checking in does not tick anything off, and nothing on the timeline changes because somebody arrived.
It is not available on templates, only on real events, since a template has no day to be on site for.

Using it well

Tell crew it is there. The button appears on its own with no explanation, which is right for a phone at a door and wrong for someone who has never seen it. A line in the event notes ("check in on your link when you arrive") is usually all it takes.
Turn it on for the events where a head-count matters: large builds, anything with a client safety requirement, anything in a venue that asks who is on site.
Check the roster before you go looking for someone. "Not checked in" is a faster answer than three phone calls.