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The check-in kiosk

A tablet by the door that students check themselves in on, by name or by scanning a QR card. Read the first task before you plan around it: you cannot turn the kiosk on yourself, and the button on your dashboard that looks like it does is broken.

Get your kiosk turned on

Not in your dashboard. Ask Catomni.

There is no kiosk control in Studio Settings — the tabs are General, Classrooms, Classes, Branding, Landing Page, Payments and Emails, and none of them mentions the kiosk except Branding, explaining where your logo appears. Catomni issues the kiosk link. This is not a permission you can be granted; the control lives in Catomni’s own admin portal.

  1. Ask Catomni to turn on kiosk check-in for your studio.
  2. Take the link they send back. It ends in ?token= followed by a long string — that string is what lets the tablet in.
  3. Open it once on any device to check it works. A live kiosk shows your studio name and a Check In heading on a black screen. From then on, Start Check-In on your studio dashboard opens the same thing.
  4. Save the link on the tablet you will use. There is no way to look it up again from your dashboard.
  5. Confirm it was issued: open Audit Log in the sidebar and look for Kiosk Token Generated.
  • Once your kiosk is on, a Start Check-In button appears among the quick actions on your studio dashboard and opens it in a new tab — handy for checking the kiosk works without digging out the link. It is not there before Catomni turns the kiosk on, because there would be nothing for it to open.
  • Treat the link as a password. Anyone who has it can search your students by name and check them in, with no sign-in at all. That is the point of a door tablet and it is also the whole risk — the kiosk is deliberately outside the normal sign-in.
  • If the tablet shows "Kiosk Mode Not Enabled", no link has been issued yet. If it shows "Access Denied" with "Invalid kiosk access token.", the link is wrong or has been reissued since you saved it.
  • A suspended studio’s kiosk stops working, valid link or not.

Run the kiosk on a tablet

The kiosk link, opened in the tablet’s browser

  1. Open the link. The kiosk fills the screen on black.
  2. Check the header: your logo beside your studio name. With no logo uploaded it shows the first letter of your studio name in a white square instead.
  3. Upload a logo first if you want your own branding on it — Settings → Branding, where the help text reads "Appears in the sidebar, studio switcher, and kiosk header."
  4. Leave the tablet on this page. It returns itself to the search screen three seconds after every check-in and puts the cursor back in the name box.
  5. Allow camera access when the tablet asks, if you want QR scanning.
  • The kiosk has no exit control, no PIN and no lock. Nothing on screen leaves it, and there is no way to sign one tablet out. Use your tablet’s own guided-access or kiosk-browser mode to pin the device to this page.
  • The footer reads "Powered by Catomni" and cannot be removed.
  • If it crashes it shows "Something went wrong" and a Try again button, and reports itself to Catomni automatically.

Check a student in by name

The kiosk’s opening screen — Check In

  1. Type into the box marked "Type your name...". Nothing happens under two characters.
  2. Wait for the list. While it works the kiosk reads "Searching..."; with no match, "No students found".
  3. Press the student’s row. Each row shows their photo or initials, their name, and the classes they have today.
  4. A student with exactly one session today is checked in immediately — there is no confirmation step.
  5. With more than one class, the kiosk asks "Select Class" and lists each class with its time and room. Press the right one, or press Cancel.
  6. Read the green screen: "Welcome, {student name}!" above the class and room. It clears itself after three seconds.
  • The search only ever offers students who have a session today. A student with nothing on today cannot be found at the kiosk however the name is spelled — check them in from the staff Check-In page instead.
  • It fetches the first eight matching students and then drops the ones with no class today, so a common surname can return "No students found" even though the student exists and is enrolled. Same remedy: the staff Check-In page.
  • Today means your studio’s timezone, not the tablet’s. A tablet that travels with you does not shift the kiosk’s day.
  • The first check-in of a session moves it from scheduled to in progress — that is what flips the card to In Progress on the staff Check-In page.
  • The kiosk checks in and nothing else. Check Out lives on the roster panel of the staff Check-In page.

Check a student in from a QR card

The kiosk’s opening screen → Scan QR Code

  1. Press Scan QR Code, under the "or" divider below the name box.
  2. Hold the card up to the camera. The screen reads "Hold your check-in QR code up to the camera."
  3. Watch for "Checking in…" — the first successful read checks the student in.
  4. Choose the class if the kiosk asks, exactly as it does for a name search.
  5. Press Cancel to close the camera and go back to the name search.
  • Parents make the cards, not you. They come from the parent portal under "Student Check-in QR Codes" — "Show or print these for kiosk check-in at the studio" — using Show QR and then Download Card. Nothing in your dashboard prints one, so point parents there.
  • A card is signed and tied to one studio. A card from another studio is refused with "QR code not valid for this studio", even for a child enrolled at both.
  • If the camera will not start you get "Could not access the camera. Please allow camera permission and try again." Check the browser’s camera permission for the site.
  • The scanner fires once per visit to the scan screen. Go back through Scan QR Code for the next student.

Still stuck on something?

The support portal has the rest, and a real person on the other end of it.