Guide
Setting up SmartWaiting: from registration to the first call
4 October 2026 · 6 min read
Registration here is an application, not self-service — we look at it and usually activate you within one to two working days. After that, setting up takes half an hour: one waiting room, the rooms inside it, the users, a poster with a QR code. This guide walks through the nine steps in the order they actually come up.
Step 1: Send the registration
Click "Register now" in the page header. The form asks for your name, your e-mail address and the name of your organisation. You do not choose a password here — that comes later, through a link only you receive. Filling it in takes two minutes.
Step 2: Wait for activation
Your registration reaches us as an application. There is no confirmation link and no self-activation: a person looks at it, usually within one to two working days. Only with activation do your organisation, your owner account and your trial come into existence. Then a welcome e-mail arrives — with a link to set your password, and no credentials in the text. A password sent by e-mail stays in a mailbox forever.
Step 3: What the trial includes
Fourteen days, no credit card and no automatic renewal. You do not have to pick a plan: there is no licence selection in the account and no self-checkout — we assign the plan, and if you want to change it, tell us. What your plan includes you can see from which menu items are there; what it does not include is not sitting around to be clicked.
Step 4: Create the first waiting room
Under "Waiting room → Setup", click "New". You give it a name and a short address line — that line later appears in the address your guests use to join. Plus two switches worth getting right straight away: whether guests may join by themselves or only your staff enter them, and how many places someone drops back when they tap "I'll come later". The default is two.
Step 5: Add rooms or counters
In the same form, below the waiting room: Treatment room 1, Counter 3, Chair 2 — whatever you call them. When calling someone, your staff pick the room, and the guest sees where to go. This is the one step people skip and come back to two days later, because "please come forward" is not useful information when there are four doors.
Step 6: Create users
Under "Settings → Users" you create the accounts for your staff and give each one a role. Here too we do not send a password but a link to set one — for the same reason as in step 2. An account can later be locked without being deleted; someone going on holiday or leaving disappears from the calling screen, and their entries stay traceable.
Step 7: Print the poster with the QR code
Every waiting room comes with a ready-made poster as a PDF, A4, with the QR code on it. Print it, put it on the door or the counter. That is all a guest needs: point the camera, enter a name, done — no app, no account, no installation. This is where most systems fail, and not for technical reasons.
Step 8: Put the display on a screen
If you have a monitor in the waiting area, open your waiting room's board there — its own address, which you leave full-screen in a browser. It shows who has just been called and which room to go to. The page reloads itself every twenty seconds, so a call appears within twenty seconds at the latest, and nobody has to click anything.
Step 9: Set up WhatsApp — or decide against it
Under "Settings → Messages" you enter your WhatsApp Business number and the credentials from your Meta account. This is more than ticking a box, and it is worth knowing why: the call to the guest goes out by WhatsApp only. Without this step everything else still works — the guest keeps their status page and sees there when it is their turn — but nothing buzzes in their pocket. Anyone who steps out for a coffee has to check for themselves.
How long it really takes
Steps 4 to 8 are done in half an hour, and the poster is up afterwards. What you cannot speed up is the activation in step 2 — one to two working days in which a person looks at your registration. That is deliberate: a system where any stranger creates an organisation in two minutes is full of organisations that do not exist within a fortnight.
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