A phone screen works well for scanning a ticket someone already has, but it gets awkward fast when you're the one selling. The options are small, the tapping takes time, and a line builds behind whoever's at the front. Picture a kirtan door on a Friday evening, a retreat check-in table with fifteen people arriving in the same ten minutes, or a festival gate at its busiest hour of the day — in each of these, whoever is taking money needs a full screen in front of them: every ticket type visible at a glance, remaining stock showing right there, and a card reader plugged in and ready to go. BrightStar's desktop box office is built for exactly that moment. It gives the person on the door room to see the whole event at once, so the queue moves at the speed of the person standing at the table, not at the speed of a cramped interface.
What do you need to run the door?
Before the door opens, it helps to know what has to be in place, and each piece matters for a different reason. The laptop or desktop and browser are what render the full door screen with every ticket type and its remaining stock. The card reader — connected over USB or Bluetooth — is what lets a buyer pay by tap or insert rather than you keying anything in by hand. The staff or door login ties every sale back to whoever processed it, which is what makes shift-by-shift reconciliation possible afterwards. And the internet connection is what keeps the door screen synced to the same ticket count as the online sales page — though if it drops partway through a shift, sales don't stop: they queue locally on the device and settle as a batch once you're back online.
- 1A laptop or desktop with a browser
- 2A supported card reader connected over USB or Bluetooth
- 3A staff or door login for your event
- 4An internet connection — offline sales queue and settle on reconnect
Taking a sale
This sequence is short by design — five steps, no detours — because a door is not where you want someone hunting through menus while a queue backs up behind them. You pick the ticket type and how many, then choose how the person is paying — card, cash, or comp. For a card payment, the reader is handed across the table so the buyer taps or inserts it themselves, rather than you handling their card. That last detail matters at a door where dozens of people are moving through: the buyer keeps control of their own card at all times. Once payment clears, the ticket goes out by print, text, or email, or the person is simply admitted on the spot.
- 1Open Dashboard → Door for your event
- 2Select ticket types and quantities
- 3Choose Card, Cash, or Comp
- 4For card, hand the reader to the buyer to tap or insert
- 5Deliver the ticket by print, text, or email — or admit straight away
How door sales reconcile with your books
A door rarely runs with one person for a whole shift, and cash rarely balances itself at the end of the night. That's why every sale at the desktop box office is tracked against the shift and against the staff member who took it — cash taken, card taken, comps issued, and any refund or void made at the door, all attributed to whoever processed the transaction. If a cash drawer comes up short afterwards, or a comp needs explaining, this is the record you check against, sale by sale, person by person. Settlement follows a similar split by payment type. Card sales settle through your usual Stripe payout, the same channel your online ticket sales already use, so there's nothing separate to set up for door revenue that came in by card. Cash never goes through Stripe at all — it's physical money that changed hands at the table, so it's recorded for your own reconciliation rather than pushed through a payment processor that never touched it.
What happens if the internet drops at the door?
A festival gate is exactly the kind of place where wifi gets patchy once a crowd and a hundred phones show up at once. If your connection drops mid-shift, the desktop box office doesn't stop selling — it queues each sale locally on the device and settles the whole batch as soon as the connection comes back. Nobody standing at the table gets turned away because a signal blipped for a few minutes. Once you're back online, those queued sales write into the same ticket count and the same shift reconciliation as everything else that shift, so nothing about the record changes because of the gap.