Setting up a venue

The first two questions, the PIN everybody knows, and getting your own tables and consoles onto the floor.

How do I set up a new venue in CoinOp?

Two questions on first run: the venue's name and the PIN everybody starts with. After that you add the kinds of thing you rent — pool tables, consoles, gaming PCs — and put them on the floor. A venue is usually taking money within the hour.

Signing in the first time

A new install has one member of staff — an owner — and the PIN is 1234. CoinOp says so on the lock screen, because a known PIN nobody has been told about is just an unlocked door. The notice disappears when the PIN is changed, and it cannot be dismissed while it is still true.

Change it today, in Settings → Staff. It is the same on every new CoinOp in the world.

The walk through

The first thing a new venue sees. Nine steps, and only three of them cannot be skipped — they print on every receipt and are hard to spot once they are wrong.

The welcome screen asking what the venue is called and what it charges in — Two questions, because two things a fresh install gets wrong are wrong for almost everybody and stay wrong quietly: it calls the venue “My Venue” on every receipt and customer screen, and it prices in dirhams.

The name goes on your receipts and on the screen your customers read. The currency is three letters — AED, SAR, GBP, EUR, USD or anything else — and CoinOp prints it beside every amount. It does not convert anything; this is simply what your prices are in.

Tax and the trading day and your own PIN are the other two that cannot be skipped. The rest — the floor, what play costs, what you sell, the receipt printer, the gaming PCs and the table lights — can each be left for later, and every one of them says so.

Each step does the thing rather than telling you where to do it. The printer step prints a test and says whether a receipt came out. The ggLeap step takes the token and reads your customers back. The last page lists the addresses this till answers on, so you leave knowing what to type into a tablet.

Settings → Venue → Setting up

What you skipped is not lost. The same list is in Settings afterwards, read from the venue rather than from a note saying somebody once did this — so a venue that emptied its floor a month later is told the floor is empty, and one that added a station on a rate card nobody priced is told that too, rather than finding out when a table will not open.

An empty floor

The floor screen of a new venue, with nothing on it and a note explaining where stations are added — A new install has no stations. CoinOp does not know what is in your room, so it does not invent nine tables for you to delete.

Putting your room in

A kind, its stations and the price card they are on — one press. Only the prices are left afterwards, and it says so.

Settings → Stations

Two lists live here. Kinds are the sorts of thing you rent — billiards tables, PS5s, gaming PCs, a cinema room. Stations are the actual ones, and each belongs to a kind.

The stations settings page, listing the venue's kinds of thing and each station under them — A kind carries an icon, the word you use for one of them, whether it has its own waiting-list queue, and whether it can be booked. A new install starts with none: setup asks what is in your room rather than handing you four to delete.

Add the kinds you have. A racing simulator, a karaoke room and a golf bay are all just kinds with your own name and icon on them — nothing in CoinOp is built around billiards.
Add a station for each real one, give it a name (people say “table 4”, so call it 4), and point it at the kind and the rate it should charge.
Go to the floor and drag them into the shape of the room.

A kind can have no stations at all and still be useful: gaming PCs are run by ggLeap rather than by CoinOp, but keeping “Gaming PC” as a kind gives you a waiting-list queue for the PCs without pretending CoinOp owns them.

The rest of the setup

In the order most venues do it: rates so time has a price, the menu so food and drink can be rung up, printers and routes so orders reach the people making them, and staff so everyone has their own PIN.

The venue settings page: name, TRN, service charge and the hour the business day starts — Settings → Venue holds the rest of the venue’s identity: the tax registration number that has to appear on invoices, an optional service charge, and the hour your business day starts — set that to when you close, and last night’s two-in-the-morning sale lands in last night’s figures.