Rates

What an hour costs, by day and hour, per player or per station — with minimums, rounding, grace and long-session prices.

How do I charge different rates at different times of day?

A rate profile sets what an hour costs by day and by hour, so Tuesday afternoon and Friday night can be different prices on the same table. Each profile can charge per station or per player, with a minimum charge, rounding, a grace period, and a cheaper rate once a session runs long.

Profiles

A new rule arrives covering the whole week. Switching off the quiet nights is what leaves Friday and Saturday, from six until two, at forty an hour.

Settings → Rates

A rate profile is a way of charging for time, and each station points at one. Most venues end up with two or three — tables, consoles, the room you hire out — rather than one per station.

A profile open, with its rules underneath. Rules run top down and the first one that matches the day and the time wins.

Per player or per station

Per player charges by how many people are on it: the tiers read “25, 18”, meaning one player pays 25 an hour and once there are two or more they each pay 18. Per station charges for the machine however many people are round it — normal for consoles and simulators.

Day and time

Each rule carries the days it applies to and the hours it covers. A venue with one flat price has one rule; most have three or four — a quieter afternoon, an evening peak, and a different weekend.

Times are clock times, and they belong to your business day. If your day starts at 4am (Settings → Venue), a rule ending at 2am is the same night, not the next one. This is the thing to get right before anything else: everything else here reads as wrong if the day boundary is wrong.

The rest of a profile

Minimum charge and minimum minutes — nobody sits down for four minutes and pays for four minutes.
Rounding — round the final charge to the nearest quarter, or up, or down. Set to 0.25 by default, which is what makes totals come out in numbers people can hand over.
Grace in and grace out — free minutes at the start and end. Three minutes of grace at the end stops the argument about whether the clock was stopped when the last ball dropped.
Long-session prices — play this long and the whole stretch costs that instead of the meter, automatically, and it repeats. Somebody just under the mark still pays the meter, which is dearer, so expect to be asked to leave the table running.

Adjusting one station

A station can carry a percentage adjustment against its profile — a table in a worse corner at 90%, the tournament table at 120% — without needing a profile of its own.

Checking it

The honest test is not the settings screen. Start a session on a station, let it run a minute, and open History on it: the charge is shown segment by segment with the rate each one was worked out at. If a rule is in the wrong place, that is where it becomes obvious.

See also: the floor for the per-session alternatives — a flat hourly price, a fixed charge or a counted-down block — which override the profile for one session without touching it.