Staff and devices

Who can sign in, what each role may do, approvals, enrolling screens, and the customer display.

How do staff PINs and permissions work?

Everybody gets their own PIN and one of four roles: staff, manager, owner or kitchen. When somebody tries what their role does not allow, CoinOp asks for a manager's PIN on the spot rather than refusing, and records both names — who did it and who allowed it.

Everybody gets their own PIN

Settings → Staff

The staff settings page listing people, their roles, and the controls to add somebody or change a PIN — Add each member of staff with their own PIN. It costs a minute and it is what makes every void, discount and drawer opening answerable to a person rather than to “the till”.

The four roles

A name, a role and four digits. From here on every void, discount and drawer opening has a person against it.

Staff

Sell, take money, run their own shift, use the kitchen screen. What a normal night needs.

Manager

Everything staff do, plus voids, refunds, discounts, correcting a start time, opening the drawer, marking a table down, approving somebody else’s request, and today’s and yesterday’s figures.

Owner

All of it: prices, settings, staff, and the venue’s full trading history.

Kitchen

The kitchen screen and nothing else. A login that sits by the fryer all day cannot ring up a sale.

Three things are deliberately kept from managers: the venue’s trading history beyond yesterday, the prices, and settings — because settings include staff, and anybody who can create an owner account has every other permission whether you gave it to them or not. That is what makes the manager role safe to hand out.

Approvals

When somebody tries something their role does not allow, CoinOp asks for a manager’s or owner’s PIN on the spot instead of refusing and sending them to find one. The action goes through, and it is recorded with both names — who did it and who allowed it.

Devices

Settings → Devices

The devices settings page: enrolled tills and screens, an enrolment code, and the option to require enrolment — Each till, tablet and screen can be enrolled: it is named, given a kind — counter, floor, kitchen — and remembered.

Enrolling a device does three things:

It lets you point routes at a particular screen, so the kitchen sees the kitchen’s work.
It marks which machine has the cash drawer attached.
Turned on, it means only enrolled devices can use CoinOp at all — so somebody on the venue’s wifi with the address cannot open the till on their phone.

To enrol: press Enrol this device on the lock screen of the machine you are enrolling, and claim the code from Settings on a machine already signed in.

How big CoinOp draws itself

The screen settings page, with the customer screen switch, the second-monitor button and a size control — Settings → Screen sets the size of everything on this device only. A 10-inch tablet held at arm’s length and a 24-inch counter monitor want different answers, and neither should have to change the other.

The customer screen

Settings → Screen → Customer screen

The monitor facing the customer shows the sale as it is rung up, and what is free when the counter is idle. One switch turns it on or off for the whole venue, and off means off at the server — a screen already running goes black rather than being asked politely to stop, because the shortcut that opens it comes back on every reboot. Black rather than a message: the person in front of it is a customer.

This page also says whether a screen is actually showing this till. The failure worth catching is not a dead screen but a live one showing the wrong till — the name is typed into the till’s settings and into the shortcut, and renaming the till changes only the first. Then the screen shows the availability map all evening, which is also what it shows when the counter is free, so nothing looks broken. CoinOp names the till it is actually showing.

Open it on the second monitor now does it there and then, when the till reaches CoinOp at localhost. Over the venue’s network address a browser will not let a page choose a monitor, and the shortcut is the way.
On Windows, the desktop shortcut the installer makes opens the till and the customer screen together — see Installing it. For a screen that has to come back after a power cut without anybody signing in, this page copies a shortcut line to put in Windows’ Startup folder. One each for the till and the screen: two Chrome windows do not fit in the 259 characters Windows allows, and it truncates without saying so.

The ● screen light

When the customer screen is switched on and nothing is showing it, a small ● screen light appears beside Floor at the top of the till. Pressing it opens the screen on the second monitor. It is there for everybody, staff included, because the person who notices a blank customer monitor at seven in the evening is whoever is on the counter — and they cannot get into Settings.