Setting up rooms

Rooms are the spaces kids check into. Scout puts each child in a room by age with no confirmation step, so the age bands you set here decide where every child goes on Sunday morning.

You need the Manage rooms & sessions permission to open room setup. Admin, Pastor, Staff, and Volunteer all have it by default. See What each permission controls.

Add your rooms

1. 1

   Open room setup

   Click Check-in in the sidebar, then Room setup at the top right. The page is titled Check-in setup.

2. 2

   Add a room

   Click Add room. The form has four fields and nothing else:

   • Name (required): what shows in your room list, in the kiosk staff panel, and on the printed labels.
   • Min age (years) and Max age (years): the band this room covers. You type years, Scout stores months. Half-years are allowed, so 0.5 means six months. Leave a bound blank for "no limit".
   • Capacity (optional): a number Scout counts against. It never blocks a check-in.

   Click Add room to save it.

3. 3

   Read the band back

   Each row in the list shows the band in months and years, so a nursery entered as 0 to 1.5 reads Ages: 0mo – 1y 6mo. If that isn't the range you meant, click the pencil to edit it.

There is no teachers or leaders field on a room. Who is serving in the nursery lives in Scheduling volunteers, on the volunteer schedule.

How Scout picks a room

Scout works from age. There is no grade field on a room, and no grade field on a person, so naming a room "K-2" is a label for your volunteers and nothing more.

At check-in Scout reads the child's birth date, works out their age in months, walks your active rooms in order, and assigns the first room whose band contains them. Two things follow from that order:

• If two bands overlap, the room that sits higher in the list wins.
• If a room has both bounds blank, it matches every child, and everything below it in the list is unreachable.

Then there are the children who match nothing. A child with no birth date on file, and a child whose age falls outside every band, both land in whatever room sits first in your list. Scout does not ask and does not flag it. The only case that produces an error is a church with no active rooms at all, which fails the check-in with No room available for Eli. Create rooms in Check-In Setup.

Nobody can override the assignment. There is no room picker on the kiosk, and no way to move a child to a different room once they are checked in. If a child gets the wrong room, fix their birth date or the room's band, then run them through check-in again.

Capacity

Capacity is a number to watch, not a limit Scout enforces. A check-in over capacity goes through the same as any other.

Where the count shows up:

• On the staff Check-in page, under Room occupancy. The meter turns amber at 80% of capacity and red at 100%, and a full room gets an At capacity pill.
• In the kiosk staff panel, behind the kiosk PIN, where the count turns red once it reaches capacity.

The parent-facing kiosk screen shows no capacity signal at all, so a volunteer watching only the tablet will never see a room fill up. Keep the Check-in page open on a phone if that matters to you.

Counts are per session and only include children who haven't been picked up yet.

Renaming, deactivating, and deleting

Rename works whenever you like, unless another room already has that name. Room names are unique within your church, so a duplicate is refused with Another room already has that name.

Renaming changes the room everywhere, including on check-ins from months ago. Scout stores which room a child was in and reads its current name, so renaming "K-2" to "Explorers" makes last October's records read Explorers too. If you need old records to keep their old label, deactivate the old room and add a new one instead of renaming.

Deactivate is the toggle on the room row. A deactivated room stops receiving children and keeps all of its history.

Delete only works on a room you have never used. The confirmation dialog says past records are kept, but the delete itself is refused the moment the room has a single check-in against it, with a message like This room has 47 historical check-ins. Deactivate it instead of deleting to preserve history. Deactivating is the real answer for a room you have retired.

Multi-service Sundays

Rooms are church-wide, so set each one up once no matter how many services you run.

What you do repeat is the session. A check-in session belongs to one service instance, so you open one session per service on the Check-in page, and each session has its own kiosk link to load on the tablet. Room counts are kept per session, so your second service starts from zero.

Two other settings on this page

The Check-in setup page also holds your Kiosk PIN (what staff enter to reach admin tools on the kiosk) and the Volunteer phone pickup switch with its Who can release children list. Both of those save through your church settings and need the Edit church settings permission, which room access alone doesn't include. Without it the PIN shows an error when you save, and the pickup toggle flips back on its own. See Picking up kids for what the pickup list does.

Before your first Sunday

Test the whole path once, on the tablet you plan to use.

1. 1

   Build a test family

   In People, create one adult and one child. The adult needs a 10-digit phone number, both records need to be active, and both need to be in the same household. Give the child a birth date, or the test won't exercise the age matching. A check-in is rejected if the adult isn't in the same household as every child being checked in.

2. 2

   Open a session

   The kiosk link only exists while a session is running, and a session needs a scheduled service to attach to. On Check-in, pick an upcoming service and click Open session. If you have no upcoming services, see Setting up your first service.

3. 3

   Run the family through

   Click Open kiosk, type the test adult's phone number, select the child, and check in. Confirm the room printed on the label is the one you expected.

4. 4

   Clean up

   Check the test child back out, then click Close session on the Check-in page so the practice run isn't sitting in Sunday's records.

See Running the kiosk for what your volunteers do with it on the day.