An afternoon to set up. Four seconds to use.
There is no installation, no hardware to buy and nobody to visit you. You do it from a laptop in your office and then you put a tablet on the wall.
Setting it up
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Put your people in
Type them, or upload the spreadsheet you already keep. You say which of your columns is the name, the email and the phone; it warns you about anyone who looks like a duplicate before it writes a single row. Add your own fields if you need them — belt grade, emergency contact, whatever your place keeps.
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Say what each of them pays for
A plan is a price and an allowance: unlimited, so many a week, so many a month, or a block of ten. Every person gets a membership on one of them, which can be active, frozen with a date it resumes, lapsed or cancelled.
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Type your weekly timetable
Monday 19:00 Level 1, Tuesday 17:30 Juniors, and so on. It is optional — without it a sign-in is simply a sign-in — but with it every arrival lands against the class it belongs to, and you get attendance per class as well as per person.
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Pair the tablet
Press Add a device and you get a six-digit code, good for ten minutes. Open your place’s address on the tablet, tap the code in on six big keys, and it is paired. That tablet can now reach the sign-in screen and nothing else in the whole system — not a report, not a person’s record, nothing.
A tablet is not a login. It has no password and no account, because it is shared by everybody who walks past it. If one goes missing you revoke it from your settings and it goes back to asking for a code.
At the door
Four ways to identify yourself, and you switch on the ones that suit your place. On none of them does a system keyboard ever appear, because on none of them is there a text box for one to appear over.
Tap your name
A single row of large initial letters, and only the letters that have somebody behind them. Tap one and the people whose surname starts with it come up as big tiles. Two taps for almost everybody. Your place can file people under first name instead if that is how you all talk to each other. There are no photographs on the tiles — nor anywhere else in the product.
Tap a PIN
Four digits on a telephone keypad. Nothing on the screen names anybody until the PIN matches, which is the setting to use if you would rather a screen by your front door did not list the people who come. A PIN is the one method that needs the network — it has to be checked — so a place with unreliable wifi should leave the name picker on as well.
Tap a date of birth
No names on the screen at all. Somebody taps their own date of birth on the page’s own number keys and then the first letter of their surname, and nothing on that tablet names anybody until the two together match one person — and then it is a first name, for two seconds, and back to the start. It is for the places where a list of names on a screen is the problem rather than the point: a support group, a food bank, a shelter, an advice service, a school gate. Switching it on switches the name list off and keeps it off, which is the whole reason it exists. This one needs the network, because the date is checked against your records on our side and the tablet never holds one — and when there is no network it says so and asks the person to see the desk, which is one tap, always on the screen, and tells you that somebody needs help.
“Is that you?”, if you want it
A switch on the same settings screen. With it on, the tablet shows the name and asks whether it is them before anything is written down — so a thumb landing on the wrong tile, or a mistyped PIN that happens to be somebody else’s, is caught before the wrong person is in your register. It is off unless you turn it on, it does not apply to “Not on the list?” (they typed their own name), and it works with the wifi off on the name list exactly as the name list does. It costs one more tap, and about a second each in a queue.
“Not on the list?”
A first name, a surname and a phone number, asked one at a time on a keyboard the page draws itself. That is the only keyboard in the product and it is 26 keys at a size you can actually hit. It files a guest, not a person — and a guest who came to a class and left a phone number is a lead. They show up on Today in their own block with the number against them, which is all it takes to ring them the next morning. At a place using the date-of-birth method it asks something different and shorter: a first name, and who they are here to see. No phone number.
Keys are sized as a fraction of the screen rather than in pixels, so a 15 mm key stays 15 mm on a bigger tablet instead of shrinking. On a 10-inch tablet they measure about 18 mm across in landscape and 22 mm upright.
When the wifi drops
The tablet carries on. Sign-ins are held on the device with the time they happened and go up when the network returns; the office shows them at the real time, marked as late-arriving. The screen tells whoever is standing there how many are waiting to send.
When somebody is over, or lapsed
Nothing happens at the door. The tablet takes the sign-in, says well done and forgets them. What counted and what did not was decided at that moment and is never recalculated, so a frozen fortnight counts for nothing and a guest counts against nobody — in every report, for ever.
When the next person steps up
The screen has already gone back to the start. It shows one first name for three seconds — two, where no names are being shown at all — and then clears, and the back button cannot bring it up again, so the person behind you never sees who you are.
In the office
Three places, on a phone, one-handed: Today, People and Settings. Everything else is a door off one of those.
| Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Today | Who is in, grouped by the class they came to, with the people who came when nothing was on, and any guests, in their own blocks. Anybody who was not on an active membership is at the top. |
| Who is here | A live board of everybody who has arrived in the last couple of hours, newest first, with how long ago in words rather than a clock time — and one tap to mark that you have called them. It keeps itself up to date without anybody refreshing it, so you can leave it open on a screen behind the desk all day and read it from across the room. It is also the screen that tells you somebody at a tablet has asked for help. |
| Attendance | Who came this week or this month, how many times, and what that is out of. The people who did not come are folded away underneath. Arrows step back through earlier weeks and months. |
| Attendance, by class | Every class that ran in the period, how many were at each, and an average per class on your timetable — including the classes nobody came to. |
| Over allowance | Anyone using more than their plan allows, and separately anyone whose block of classes is nearly gone. Lapsed people who are still turning up are on it too. |
| Drifting | Active people who have not been in for a fortnight, longest away first. And, separately, the people who joined and have never once come. |
| A person | This week, this month, ever, and every sign-in month by month — plus what that person has been sent and when. |
A week is Monday to Sunday, and a month is a calendar month. The clocks going forward inside a week does not shorten it.
The two reminders
Both are off until you switch them on, and each has its own audience. They are deliberately not the same message pointed at two different people.
The digest — to you
One email in the morning: who went over their allowance, whose block is nearly used up, and who signed in on a membership that has ended. A section with nothing in it is left out, and a morning with nothing in it at all sends no email.
It is your own business and it is never sent to the person it is about. “You have been coming too often” is not a service message.
The nudge — to a person
A short message to somebody who has not been in for a while — fourteen days by default, and you set the number. You write the words. It goes once for that absence, it is written down against that person, and it does not go again until they have been back and drifted away a second time.
Three separate switches: you can turn the whole thing off, the person it is about can opt out, and a junior’s message is addressed to the parent on their record rather than to the child.
Easier to look at than to read about
Sign-up is closed for now: leave your email and we’ll tell you when it opens, or email hello@tapinbook.co.uk with a question first. £19 a month, no VAT on top, 30-day free trial and no card.