How to Set Up QR Code Check-In for an Event
For the full picture of what's available — geofencing, expiry, and the separate calendar QR type — see the events overview. This is the setup sequence: what to actually configure, in order, before you print anything for the door.
Decide what "check-in" should actually do first
Before touching any settings, decide what scanning the code should land someone on — a check-in confirmation page, a schedule, a Wi-Fi network for the venue, a welcome/info page. That destination is what you'll build or link to; the geofencing and expiry settings below just control when and where that destination is reachable, not what it contains.
The setup sequence
- Create the dynamic link and set its destination to whatever page you decided on above.
- Turn on geofencing and set the venue's coordinates and a radius. Err on the wider side for a large or indoor venue — GPS accuracy drops indoors, and a radius that's too tight will lock out real attendees standing right at the door. See the full geofencing mechanics for how the radius check actually works.
- Set an expiration date matching the event's end (or the end of the check-in window specifically, if that's narrower than the whole event) via the expiry settings. Skip a scan-count limit unless you're deliberately capping attendance — a limit on general check-in will lock out the exact people it's meant to admit once it's hit.
- Test it on-site, or as close to on-site as you can get, before the event. Geofencing genuinely depends on GPS, so a desk test three miles away will correctly fail — that's expected, not a bug. Test from the actual venue, or a location you've deliberately set the geofence to include.
- Print and place it at the actual check-in point, not scattered around the venue — a geofenced code still works from a small area, but it needs to be somewhere within that radius to be usable at all.
What happens when someone can't check in
Two different failure modes look similar but mean different things: someone outside the radius sees a plain "this code only works on-site" message, while someone scanning after the expiry date sees a separate "this has expired" message. If you're getting reports of check-in failing during the actual event window, that points at the radius being too tight or a GPS accuracy issue, not the expiry setting — worth knowing which one you're debugging before changing anything.