Configuring a location
Queues
A queue is a line customers join. This page covers creating them, keeping them tidy, and retiring the ones you no longer use without losing the history that went through them.
Where they live
Location settingsQueues. Queues belong to a branch, so each one has its own — a chain does not share a line between shops.
Needs the permission locations.update_all_settings (update all locations settings). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
Creating and naming
The only thing a queue needs is a name. Everything that shapes behaviour — hours, capacity, what you ask people, what they are told — belongs to the location, so it stays consistent however many queues you run.
Name them for customers rather than for yourself. Visitors see the name when a branch has more than one queue, and “Prescription collection” is a choice somebody can make where “Queue 2” is a guess.
Order
Where a branch has several, you can move them up and down. That order is what customers see when they choose, and what your team's filter tabs follow. Put the most common one first — most people pick the first plausible option.
Renaming
Safe at any time. The name is display text and nothing is keyed to it, so renaming does not disturb anybody currently waiting or any past visit.
Archiving, not deleting
A queue you have stopped using is archived. It disappears from the customer's choices and from your team's filters, and every visit that ever went through it stays intact — so last quarter's reports still add up.
Archived queues can be restored, which makes this the right tool for a seasonal line you run for three months a year.
Check nothing is waiting before archiving
Archive a queue with people still in it and those people are in a line nobody is watching. Work it down to empty first.
How many to run
One, until you have a specific reason for two. Splitting a line divides your waiting customers into lists your team then has to recombine in their heads, and it splits the wait estimate too — which is right when the queues genuinely move at different speeds and misleading when they do not.
Split when
- The lines move at genuinely different speeds — drop-offs against consultations.
- Different staff serve each, at a different desk.
- A customer would be annoyed to wait behind the other kind of visit.
Pointing a QR code at one queue
A QR code can name a queue, sending anybody who scans it straight into that line with no choice to make. This is what makes several queues workable: the code on the returns desk goes to returns, the code on the door offers the choice. See printing QR codes.