Multi-site parking management: one account, several car parks

Opening a second car park is not setting up the first one again. New questions arrive: how many vehicles are in each site, who collected what tonight, which car park is this attendant working at, and how does the owner see the total on one screen. This page describes what multi-site parking management genuinely needs, and how one business stays consistent across several devices.

What a site is, and why it is not a second account

The most common mistake is opening the second car park as a second account. It feels easy at that moment; three things break afterwards:

• The total disappears. Two accounts do not add up; the owner reads two separate reports and sums them mentally.
• Staff get split. Someone working at both sites needs two invitations and occupies two device slots.
• Tariffs and subscribers get duplicated. Writing the same tariff twice makes two tariffs that resemble each other without being the same.

The right structure keeps branches under a single business account: each branch has its own capacity, location, till, occupancy and reports, while the account stays one.

The idea of the active branch

The key to multi-site work is that the app keeps "which car park am I in right now" unambiguous. Tapping the branch name at the top of the panel selects the active branch; entry and exit, the till, the reports and the TV board all follow it. Selecting "All branches" in the till shows the combined figure.

This simple rule prevents the two most common multi-site mix-ups: taking a vehicle into the wrong site, and reading the wrong site's till. For the same reason the TV board locks to the branch that was active when it was paired — pairing again while another branch is active moves the board.

Staff: who works where, and what do they see?

The more sites there are, the more permissions matter. Three roles are enough in practice:

• Owner: everything, including branches, staff, tariffs, currency and security settings.
• Branch manager: daily work, tariff editing, reports, till totals, expenses and fee corrections. No access to business settings or staff management.
• Attendant: vehicle entry and exit and subscriber collections only; no till totals, expenses or reports.

Staff join with a single-use six-digit invitation code, and which branch they work at is set in settings. On a shared device — a booth tablet, say — selecting "who is using this device" credits collections to that person; the "who collected how much" line in the end-of-day report comes from there.

Multiple devices: one business, several screens

In a multi-site business the number of devices grows too: a tablet in the booth, a phone in the attendant's pocket, a computer in the office, the owner's phone at home. Every device signed in with the same account sees the same business, and changes sync within seconds.

Two technical details concern the operator directly:

• Conflicts. If the same record is changed on two devices at once, the last write wins, and the server prevents an older copy arriving late from overwriting a newer one.
• Device count. The number of staff devices attached to the business is limited (the owner's device is not counted), and an open web tab counts as a device. Unused devices can be switched off in settings.

What happens to the sites when the line drops?

Connectivity in parking booths is not always good, least of all in an underground car park. Entry, exit, fee calculation and the till run on the device itself and sync to the cloud once the line returns. One site being offline does not affect the others, because each device keeps its own records and they merge afterwards.

Two things do need a connection: the receipt QR page shown to the customer and the capacity board on the television, both of which read from the cloud. The browser version needs one as well — phones and tablets keep working while the web waits.

The owner's single screen: end-of-day and period reports

What a multi-site business really wants is one figure. The end-of-day summary collects revenue, the cash/card split, expenses, net, vehicles in and out and who collected how much into one text, sent over WhatsApp or SMS with no app needed on the other side. Period reports take a date range and show a daily revenue chart, income and expenses and daily averages.

The till offers an "All branches" total alongside the per-branch view — and because both are computed from the same records, the numbers agree.

A shop window for every site

Once a branch has a capacity, free spaces are calculated and become useful in two places: the live capacity board on the booth television, and an optional listing on the driver map. The map listing is per branch: you choose which car parks are visible to drivers and can switch any of them off at any time. Plates and amounts are never shared.