How-to

Creating a walk-in booking

How walk-ins are created in Light — customers self-serve via the kiosk or you can launch straight into a service.

A walk-in is a booking for a customer who arrives without scheduling in advance. In the self-serve flow covered here, the customer creates the booking themselves — through a kiosk in your pharmacy or a walk-in URL shared via QR code. The booking lands in Light the moment they finish, and from there you treat it like any other booking.

Before you start

Make sure your site has the walk-in surface available:

  • The Kiosks page has a Copy kiosk home URL action under the Kiosk Settings card. The URL ends in /walk-in/<your-site-slug> and is what kiosks and walk-in QR codes point to.
  • At least one kiosk device is paired and has Show walk-in enabled on its device edit sheet — see Setting up a kiosk. Or, if you don't run a kiosk, the same URL works on any phone or tablet — print a QR code at the counter or share the link.
  • The services you want walk-ins to choose from are configured to appear in the public booking surface. Set this on each service offering.

What the customer does

When a customer arrives without a booking, they pick up the kiosk or scan the QR code at the counter. From the welcome screen they tap I'm here for a walk-in, then:

  1. Pick a service

    The customer chooses from the services your site has made bookable — flu vaccinations, MedsCheck, DAA review, and so on. Services that aren't published to the public booking surface don't appear.

  2. Fill in the intake

    The customer enters their details (name, date of birth, contact) and any service-specific intake form — the same forms a scheduled customer would complete in advance.

  3. Confirm

    The customer confirms. Light creates the booking at the current time on the resource the service runs on, and the kiosk shows a success screen letting them know to take a seat.

The booking arrives in your Dashboard and Bookings list immediately, in the Booked state with a Walk-In badge so you can spot it at a glance.

Walk-in registration links stay valid for an hour after the appointment time ends. A customer who arrives a little late — or takes a while to finish their intake form on a phone — can still register and check in. Past that grace window the link goes to the "booking ended" screen and you'll need to create a fresh walk-in.

What you do

Treat walk-ins the same as any other booking:

  • Open the booking from the Dashboard or Bookings list when the customer is ready to be seen.
  • Mark attendance when you start the consult.
  • Record the encounter as normal.

If a walk-in is still waiting for the customer to finish (they left the kiosk mid-flow, or the booking was created some other way), the booking detail page shows a kiosk-send panel with QR code, copy-link, and send-to-paired-kiosk controls — the same controls used for sent bookings. Push the link to a paired kiosk, or share the URL via SMS.

What walk-ins don't do

  • They don't auto-mark the customer as attended — the booking sits in Booked until you mark it Attended or Missed.
  • They don't bypass resource availability. A walk-in still needs an open slot on the resource the service runs on; if no slot is available the customer sees that on the kiosk and is prompted to ask staff.
  • They don't replace the scheduled booking flow that staff use for phone bookings or future-dated appointments.

Starting a service without a booking

If a customer is already in front of you and you just want to record the encounter — no booking required — see Starting a service without a booking instead. That flow is staff-driven and skips the diary entirely.