When an event spans more than one gate — a festival with a main entrance and a VIP lane, a retreat center with a main door and a side door for late arrivals, a large kirtan hall with several room entries for breakout sessions — a single check-in point becomes both a bottleneck and a blind spot. Multi-entrance tracking lets BrightStar record which gate each attendee actually came through, instead of folding every scan into one undifferentiated total. That distinction matters the moment you need to know not just how many people are inside, but where they came in, how fast each line is moving, and whether one gate is backed up while another sits idle. It's the same underlying check-in system — one ticket, one scan — simply split across as many entry points as your event actually has.
Setting Up Multiple Entrances
Configuring separate entry points takes a few steps, done once before doors open:
- 1Go to Event → Check-In Settings
- 2Click "Add Entrance"
- 3Name each entrance (e.g., "Main Gate", "VIP Entrance", "Side Door")
- 4Generate a unique scanner link for each
- 5Distribute links to the respective volunteers
- 6Each entrance then tracks scans independently
What the Real-Time Dashboard Shows You
Once entrances are live, each one reports its own numbers back to a shared dashboard, so you're never staring at a single combined figure that hides what's actually happening at the door. Per-entrance metrics include total scanned, scans per hour, the current rate in scans per minute, and unique versus duplicate attempts — that last one matters because it tells you if someone is trying to reuse a ticket at that specific gate. Alongside those, an overall view rolls everything up: total attendance across all entrances, check-in percentage against your total ticket count, peak check-in times, and remaining capacity. If you're managing a hard venue cap, remaining capacity is the number to watch. If you're deciding whether to open a second lane, scans per minute at each gate tells you where the pressure actually is.
When You'd Use Multiple Entrances
Splitting check-in across entrances isn't only for enormous festivals. It's useful anywhere knowing where and how someone entered tells you something a single combined number wouldn't. Session-based events work a little differently underneath: a check-in at a room door looks up that person's session signup rather than their ticket, and is recorded separately from the main entrance scan, so walking into one room doesn't use up the ticket itself.
Why Each Entrance Tracks Independently
Giving each entrance its own scanner link isn't just for labeling — it's what makes the independent tracking possible in the first place. Each device holds its own session, which can be revoked on its own without disturbing any other door if a volunteer's phone is lost or a link needs to be shut off. If a device loses signal mid-shift, it queues its own scans locally and replays only those when it reconnects, so a spotty connection at the side door doesn't affect the main gate's numbers. Because the check-in recorded against a ticket notes which device made it, attribution to a specific entrance follows automatically from how that link was set up, rather than depending on a volunteer remembering to select the right option under pressure.