Hold, missed & putting people back
Real queues are messy — someone steps out, someone doesn't hear their number, someone comes back an hour later. These are the tiles that keep the line honest without ever losing a visitor.
- 1Waiting
- 2Called
- 3Hold / MissedParked on purpose, or didn't answer the call
- 4Back in the linePut back in line, Bring back, or Re-check in for a journey
Hold & Hold here
Two ways to park someone who isn't ready, both from a called or serving guest's tiles:
| You press | What happens |
|---|---|
| Hold | Parks them on the Hold tab. Their tracker shows their spot is on hold, so they know not to rejoin. |
| Hold at station | Parks them but keeps them attached to your stationA spot where one staff member serves one visitor — a chair, desk, room or counter. — for “the colour is developing” or “waiting on the pharmacy”, where the chair stays theirs. |
| Bring back | Returns a held guest to the line. |
| Recall | Calls a plain-held guest straight back to the board. Not available for a guest held at a station. |
Held guests can still be transferred, or cancelled if they've left for good.
The Missed tab & no-show grace
When someone is called and never came — they don't appear — mark them No-show and they move to the Missed tab.
A called booking that never checks in gets your line's no-show graceHow long a called visitor's spot is held before they're marked a no-show. first (a per-line setting, 10 minutes by default) before it's treated as missed — the full story is in No-shows & grace.
What's on the Missed tab
| Row | What it means |
|---|---|
| No-show | Called and never arrived. |
| Appointment | A booking that never checked in at all, shown with its due time for your records. |
| Closed out | A visit the overnight tidy-up ended. |
- When a board does carry it, the strip reads “Missed — please check in” and shows numbers only, never names.
- Until you've added one on Displays, keep calling missed names aloud yourself — the room isn't being told for you.
Putting someone back in the line
Select anyone on Missed (or even Recently served) and the panel offers Put back in line. Where they land is a line setting (Line settings → Staff controls):
| Setting ON (default) Popular | Setting OFF | |
|---|---|---|
| Where they land | Back of the line, fresh wait clock | Their original spot — their old join time still counts |
| A fresh heads-up message? | Yes — it's a new wait | No — it's treated as the same wait. Keep an eye on the board for them. |
- People who have waited longer will still be called after them. Say yes with Put back in line, or Leave as is.
- If they still need their booking's place, use their booking record on the Bookings page instead of putting the visit back from here.
A visitor on a journeyA visit that passes through several stops in order (e.g. reception → consult → pharmacy). Each stop is its own line. is different — their tile is Re-check in, which returns them to their current stage at their original arrival order.
A journey can't simply be “put back in line” from scratch, and once a multi-stop visit has properly ended it can't be reopened at all. The whole of it is in Running a multi-stop visit.
(This one's a walk-in to begin with, so there's no booking to lose — see the box above for a booked visitor.)
A guest left on hold all day
A hold is meant to last minutes. If one is forgotten, turnda closes it after four hours and the visit ends on its own — otherwise a hold nobody remembers would sit in your line for ever, quietly dragging your average wait out with it.
- The habit that protects you is the Hold list itself — glance at it before you close up, because anyone still sitting there has been waiting since you put them there.
The auto-clear timer
A called guest that nobody resolves — the operator got busy, the guest evaporated — would otherwise sit in “Being seen now” forever.
| Setting | Detail |
|---|---|
| Auto-clear a called guest after | Line settings → Serving order. 30 minutes by default, settable 5–240 or Off. Marks such a guest a no-show automatically — exactly as if you'd pressed the No-show tile — so they land on Missed and can still be put back. |
- The timer counts from the most recent call — a Recall restarts it.
- If an operator acts on the guest first, the timer quietly stands down.
If it goes wrong
| What you see | Why |
|---|---|
| Put back in line greyed out | That visit has ended for good (or it's a journey — use Re-check in). |
| Put someone back and they got no message | Your line keeps the original spot (Send re-queued visitors to the back is off) — same wait, no re-notify. |
| A guest vanished from “Being seen now” on their own | That's the auto-clear timer doing its job — check the Missed tab. |
Related: No-shows & grace · The public board · Serving order & fairness