Who is allowed to start a session

The unpriced machine

A session bills by multiplying a clock by a rate. Take the rate away and the arithmetic has nothing to work with, so the counter either cannot start the session or starts it knowing no bill will come out of the other end.

Thirty stations across the platform sit at cafés where no machine type has been priced at all. Those are not edge cases, they are floors where the first customer of the day cannot be charged.

The three ways a rig gets played for nothing

The first is the unpriced machine above. The second is the friend of the staff, which no software prevents and every owner knows about. The third is the session that was started properly and then never ended, so the clock ran out into the night and the bill was written off in the morning.

Only the first and third are software problems, and both are fixable in an afternoon.

• check_circlePrice every machine type, including the one nobody uses
• check_circlePut a planned finish on a session so it ends itself rather than running overnight
• check_circleMake starting a session require a person, with their own login, not a shared counter account

Who the account belongs to

A shared counter login is the quiet version of this problem. When everybody is the same user, nothing on the floor can be traced to a person, and the question of who started a free session has no answer.

Separate logins cost nothing and change the conversation from an accusation to a record.

Questions people ask

How do I stop staff giving away free play?

Start with the parts that are not about trust: price every machine so a session can always raise a bill, give sessions a planned finish so none runs overnight, and give each person their own login so the floor has a record of who did what.

Why can I not start a session on one of my stations?

Almost always because the machine type it belongs to has no price set. The clock has no rate to bill against. Setting a price for that type makes the station sellable immediately.