--- title: "How Live Capacity Works: Counting People In and Out Without Turnstiles" slug: how-scanqueue-live-capacity-works date: 2026-07-23 author: ScanQueue Team author_role: Queue Management Experts category: events category_label: Events & Venues read_time: 9 min read excerpt: "A walkthrough of Live Capacity in ScanQueue: how guests enter and leave by QR, what the door and floor-manager screens show, and the three layers that keep the occupancy number honest." canonical_url: https://www.scanqueue.com/blog/how-scanqueue-live-capacity-works --- **Ask most venue teams how many people are inside right now and you will get a number that came from a clicker, a clipboard, or somebody's best guess.** That is fine at 40 guests. At 400 it is the difference between running the room and hoping. Turnstiles solve it, and they cost more than most activations earn, take weeks to install, and cannot move. Live Capacity solves the same problem with two printed QR posters and the phones your guests already carry. This is how it actually works: what guests do, what your door and floor staff see, and the honest answer to the question every ops lead asks first, which is what happens when people walk out without scanning. ## Why a queue is not the same as a headcount A standard queue tracks progress towards being served. Somebody joins, gets called, gets served, and disappears from the board. It never needs to know where they went, because being served is the end of the story. A capacity-bound venue has a different question. Not "who is next" but "who is still in the room". That needs an exit event, and it needs the count to stay honest for hours across thousands of entries. The usual pattern of finding somebody in a list and tapping Done holds up to roughly 50 to 100 concurrent guests, then falls apart. Events routinely run five to ten times that. Live Capacity is the mode for that second question. Same queue underneath, different job. ## The whole install is two posters 1. **Print the entrance poster.** Guests scan it, fill a short form, and join the line outside. 2. **Print an exit poster for every exit.** Guests scan on the way out. The page already knows who they are, so it is one tap. 3. **Open the dashboard on any tablet.** Door staff admit people, the floor manager watches the number. Both posters print from the dashboard, with headings you can word yourself. No hardware, no cabling, no install day. If the entrance moves, you move the poster. ## What the door sees The Entrance screen is built for someone standing at a gate holding a tablet, working fast, possibly in the cold. ![ScanQueue Live Capacity Entrance screen showing 31 of 50 occupancy with an Accepting badge, a Currently Called card with Check In and No-Show buttons, an Up Next card with Call Next, a searchable waiting list, and a recently admitted list](/live-capacity-entrance.png) Occupancy, who is at the gate, who is next, and everyone waiting, on one screen. The number across the top is the whole point. It reads in **people, not parties**, so a family of four counts as four. Green well under the cap, amber as it fills, red at the line. Next to it, the counts your door staff actually call out to each other: admitted, called and waiting to arrive, still in the queue. Below that is the working area. Currently Called is the guest who has been summoned and is walking over, with Check In, No-Show, and a resend if their phone did not buzz. Up Next and one big Call Next button. The waiting list is searchable, because at a real event somebody will always come to the front and say their name instead of waiting to be called. Recently Admitted is there so staff can answer "did she already go in?" without leaving the screen. ## What the guest sees The guest journey is four states on one link, and it updates itself: in line, you are up, you are inside, checked out. No app, no account, no refreshing. ![Live Capacity guest ticket on a phone reading You're inside, showing party size, entry time, auto-checkout time, and an I'm leaving now button](/live-capacity-guest-inside.png) The inside state, with the auto-checkout time stated plainly and a self-checkout button. When staff call them, the text says to come to the entrance now rather than the usual "your table is ready" wording, because at a venue gate that difference matters. A Spanish version goes out automatically where it applies. ## The exit problem, and the three layers that solve it Entry is easy. Everybody wants to get in, so everybody scans. **Exit is where occupancy systems quietly fail**, because nobody has any incentive to tell you they left. Miss enough exits and by mid-afternoon your count says the room is full when it is half empty. So there are three layers, and they are deliberately redundant: - **The exit QR, for most people.** Scan on the way out, confirm, done. Scanning twice is harmless. If they came as a group, they get asked whether the whole party is leaving or just them. - **The Exit Station, for the ones who will not.** Gloves, dead battery, kids, a phone at the bottom of a bag. Staff search the list of everyone currently inside by name or phone and mark them out, whole group in one confirm. - **Auto-checkout, for the long tail.** Set a session length that fits your venue and anyone still showing as inside past it is cleared automatically. This is the layer that stops slow upward drift, and it runs whether or not anybody is watching. None of the three is good enough alone. Together they keep the number close enough to reality to make decisions on. ## What the floor manager sees ![ScanQueue Live Capacity Overview screen showing total occupancy, entries today, in queue and exits last hour, a per-zone capacity card with progress bar, a 60-minute occupancy trend chart, and a live activity feed](/live-capacity-overview.png) Occupancy, throughput and the last hour of movement, for whoever is running the floor. Overview answers the questions that come over the radio. How full are we. How many have come through today. How fast are people leaving. The trend line is the useful one: a room at 31 of 50 and rising needs a different decision from a room at 31 and falling, and the flat number cannot tell you which you have. The activity feed underneath is the audit trail, and it is what sponsor and post-event reporting gets built from. Because every guest keeps their identity from entry to exit, you also get length of stay per visitor rather than just a turnstile tally. ## Built for the day it actually gets used An event is one bad day where everything happens at once, so the unglamorous parts matter more than the features: - **The line is not capped.** Venue capacity limits who gets in, not how many can queue. A 500-person line is fine. - **Two staff cannot collide.** Every action checks the state it expects before it writes, so two people working the same gate cannot double-admit a guest or double-send a text. - **A dropped connection heals itself.** Live updates plus a polling backstop, so a silently dead websocket does not leave the door staring at a frozen number. - **Failed writes say so.** If something does not save, staff get told, rather than tapping a button that quietly did nothing. ## Where it fits, and where it does not Live Capacity suits spaces with a real limit and real churn: rinks and courts, fan zones, brand activations, timed-entry exhibits, breakout rooms and expo stands, festival viewing platforms, attraction zones. Anywhere the honest answer to "can we let more people in" changes minute to minute. Two things to be straight about before you plan around it: - **The cap is operational, not physical.** The screen warns and the admit controls disable at the limit, but the gate and your staff are the enforcement. Two doors admitting simultaneously can overshoot by a party. If you are working to a regulatory limit that software must never exceed, raise it with us first. - **Guests cannot look themselves up by phone number at the exit.** That is deliberate: it would let anyone probe who is inside. The Exit Station is the staffed answer instead. If your venue is not capacity-bound and you just need people to stop standing in a line, the ordinary [virtual queue](/blog/virtual-queue-management-small-business) is the simpler fit. Running an event more generally? Start with the [event queue management guide](/blog/event-queue-management-guide). ## Getting it switched on Live Capacity is enabled per account by our team rather than through a self-serve toggle, because turning it on changes what the entire dashboard does. Once it is on, picking your space, setting the capacity and choosing an auto-checkout window take a couple of minutes, and the posters print from the same screen. There is a fuller product overview on the [Live Capacity page](/live-capacity). When you know your venue and rough numbers, [get in touch](/contact) and we will set it up with you and brief your door team.