In-Person Operations for Tutoring Centers
Run a physical center's day from one screen: a room board, a staff-operated walk-in queue, one-use payment QR codes, and a printable front-desk day sheet.
Ten minutes before four on a Tuesday, a mother walks in with her ninth grader to ask about geometry help. Behind her, the four o'clock students are arriving, a tutor leans out to ask which room he's in today, and the system holding all of it together is a whiteboard by the desk and whoever happens to be standing near it.
Software built for online tutoring treats that scene as somebody else's problem. Gigpie gives it a screen: an admin Front Desk view showing every physical room, every session on today's schedule, and every walk-in currently waiting, all editable while the lobby watches.
The Room Board and Today's Schedule
Rooms here are the ones in your building, not video call rooms. Each has a name and a location, and any scheduled session can be assigned one. The Front Desk page lays the day out as a board: what is happening in each room, what starts next, and a dropdown on every session row to move it when the small room in back frees up early.
The assignment follows the session everywhere else. Admins get a Room column in the session list and on mobile cards, tutors see the room on their own session views, and the session detail page shows the room, its location, and any walk-ins attached. One thing the board deliberately does not do is police you: nothing blocks two sessions from landing in the same room at the same hour. It makes the clash visible; a human still resolves it.
Walk-Ins Get a Queue, Not a Sticky Note
Check-in is one dialog. For an existing student, pick the record and the name, phone, and email fill in on their own; for a new family, a guest name is enough to start. Every walk-in then moves through a live queue with five states: waiting, assigned, in session, completed, or left. Hand one a room or a session at check-in and Gigpie marks them assigned immediately; change your mind later and the reassignment is inline in the queue table.
This is a tool for the person behind the desk, not a kiosk in the lobby. A staff member checks every visitor in, on purpose: the front desk keeps the conversation, and the queue keeps the record.
From Walk-In to Paid Enrollment Before They Leave
The parent who arrived at 3:50 can be a paying family by 4:00. From the Front Desk view, staff open the "Mobile payment and intake" action and generate a payment QR code for any package you have marked publicly shared; that action mints its own walk-in record to carry the code, separate from any check-in already sitting in the queue. The visitor scans it and pays on her own phone through the same public checkout your online families use, with no lobby tablet and no card reader. When the payment completes, the purchase claims the walk-in record the code created, so the sale stays attached to the visit that produced it.
The code is built like a security credential because it is one: it works exactly once and expires four hours after it is created. A code that gets screenshotted or sits in someone's photo roll overnight is already dead.
Worked example: staff check a walk-in student in at 3:52, giving him a spot in the queue. At 3:55, staff open the payment QR action separately and mint a code for a 12-hour, $480 package; that action creates its own walk-in record to carry the code, distinct from the one already in the queue. His mother scans it and pays from the lobby at 3:58; the purchase claims the walk-in record the code created, not the 3:52 check-in, and the code dies on first use (it would have expired on its own at 7:55). Gigpie's fee on the sale is the same flat 2% as any other payment: $9.60.
A Day Sheet for the Clipboard
Some front desks run on paper, and that is fine. An admin can print the day sheet for any date: rooms, sessions, and walk-ins on one run sheet, formatted for the printer. Print it at opening, work the desk from the clipboard, and treat the screen as the source of truth when things move. The sheet is an admin tool for the front desk; tutors see their room assignments on their session views, but there is no tutor-facing print button.
Who This Is For
Centers with a front door, where families show up in person and rooms are a real constraint. If your company is fully online, skip this feature; the room board and walk-in queue would just be empty screens, and the rest of Gigpie works the same without them. Solo tutors teaching at a kitchen table don't need it either.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a self-service check-in kiosk?
No, and it isn't trying to be. Staff check every visitor in from the admin Front Desk view. The only thing a visitor does on their own device is pay, by scanning the QR code your staff generates.
Does assigning rooms prevent double-booking?
No. The board shows you the collision; it does not block the booking. The board and the day sheet show which sessions are in which rooms so a clash is easy to spot, but Gigpie will not block two sessions from being booked into the same room at the same time.
What exactly does the payment QR code do?
It carries a one-use link to the public checkout page of a package you've marked publicly shared. The visitor pays on their own phone; the code expires four hours after it's created and stops working after one successful payment. The completed purchase claims the walk-in record, and if a code expires unused, staff can generate a new one.
Can a walk-in be an existing student?
Yes. Pick the student's record at check-in and their name, phone, and email fill in automatically. Visitors who aren't in your system yet are checked in as guests with whatever name they give you.
Do walk-ins have to buy something?
No. A walk-in can be checked in, assigned a room or a session, and marked completed without a payment ever attached. The QR checkout exists for the visits that turn into enrollments.
Can tutors print their own schedules?
The printable day sheet is admin-only and built for the front desk. Tutors see their room assignments on their session list and session pages, but there is no tutor-facing print view.
Give your front desk one screen
Free until you collect revenue, then a flat 2% of what families pay you. Rooms, walk-ins, and QR checkout are part of the same plan, not a separate module.
Get started freeRelated Resources
- Tutoring Center Solutions - A full week at a multi-tutor center, with Tuesday afternoon spent at this front desk
- Smart Scheduling - The session engine the room board and day sheet sit on top of
- Billing & Payments - The public checkout flow the walk-in QR code points at