How to count people through a door: headcounts, attendance and capacity.

Somebody has to know how many people came in. At a hall, a gate, a classroom, a church, a shop on a Saturday, a tour that leaves the coach with twenty-three and needs to come back with twenty-three. The number matters at the end — to the fire officer, the attendance sheet, the organiser who paid for the room — and you have to produce it while also greeting people, checking tickets and answering the question about the toilets.

That is where the count breaks. Not at forty or four hundred, but at the family of five that came through while you were pointing someone to the cloakroom. Did they go in already? You can guess, or you can go back to a number you trust. This post is about setting up your phone so there is always a number you trust.

What people count with now

A mechanical clicker. Fast, and honest about what it is. It holds one number, has no memory of when anyone arrived, and cannot count anyone out. Put it down and it is gone; knock the reset knob and so is the count. Three hundred clicks later there is nothing to show anyone but the dial.

Paper tally marks. Five-bar gates on a clipboard. Fine at a slow door and useless at a busy one, because you need a hand for the pen and eyes on the paper at the moment you most need them on the door. Rain does not help.

Ticket stubs and sign-in sheets. Accurate for the people who had a ticket or stopped to sign. Attendance is usually about the ones who did not.

Your head. Works to about thirty, if nobody talks to you.

A phone in your pocket already does better than all of these, once it is set up for the job.

The setup

The whole setup is one counter with a few settings, and the settings are what make the number trustworthy.

One counter per door, named for the door

Make a counter and call it what it is: Main entrance, Sunday 10:30, Coach 2. Give it a colour you can pick out at a glance. If you look after more than one entrance in an evening, or run the same count every week, put the counters in a folder — Autumn fair, Sunday service — and the folder shows the sum of everything in it at the top.

Step 1, and a starting value that matches the room

One tap is one person, so the step is 1. The starting value is usually 0. Not always: if you take over a door mid-shift and there are already 112 people inside, start the counter at 112 and it shows the true number in the room from your first tap.

Count with the volume buttons

Turn on volume-button control. Volume up adds one, volume down takes one away. Now the phone can stay in your hand at your side or in a jacket pocket, and you count without looking down. Turn vibration on and sound off: a short buzz tells you the tap landed, and nobody at the door hears a click for every person.

Counting down matters more than it sounds. When people leave through the same door, volume down keeps the counter at the number actually inside, which is the number a capacity limit is about.

A group of four walks in

Tap four times, or use the quick steps beside the main button and add four at once. Either way the history records what happened and when, so a burst of arrivals shows up later as a burst rather than a smear.

Set the capacity as the goal

If the room has a limit, put it in as the goal. The counter shows how many are in, how many can still come, and alerts you when you reach it. Choose keep counting on reach rather than stop, so if the number goes over you know by how much. Reset is the wrong choice here for the same reason.

Lock it when you are not counting

Between sessions, on a break, or when the phone goes back in a pocket for an hour, lock the counter. A locked counter ignores taps until you unlock it, and forty minutes of careful counting survives the walk to the car.

Let the history do the paperwork

Every tap is written down with the time it happened. That is the part a clicker cannot do, and it turns a headcount into a record. Open the history and you can see when the rush came, how many arrived after the start, how many were still coming in at the interval. At the end of the night, export the counter to CSV and the whole sequence lands in a spreadsheet you can send to whoever asked for the number.

Recurring counts

Weekly attendance is the same door many times. Two habits keep the record straight.

Keep one counter per session and make the next one by copying the last, so step, goal and colour carry over and the name is the only thing you change. Archive sessions once they are recorded; they stay in the history and out of the way.

Finish the session before you reset anything. Export first, then reset or archive. A number you exported cannot be lost to a slip.

When one phone is not enough

Several doors, several people, one live total across all of them: that is a different tool. Tally Counter keeps everything on your own device and never asks you to sign in, which is why it works in a basement with no signal and why it does not sync a total between phones. If two of you cover two entrances, each counts their own door, and the two CSV exports add up afterwards in the same spreadsheet. If you need the live combined number on every phone, look for a counter built around accounts and sync.

Making the number trustworthy

• Take a wrong tap back straight away. Volume down, or the minus, in the same second. Reconstructing the count ten minutes later never goes well.
• Lock the counter whenever you stop counting.
• Export before you reset. The CSV is the record; the counter is only the display.
• Name counters for the door and the date. Door is not a name you will understand in November.

Reminders, history notes and PDF export are part of Premium; a PDF of the history, with the time of every arrival, is the thing to hand a fire officer. Counting, unlimited counters, folders, goals, history and CSV export are free.

Common questions

Can I count people in and out? Yes. With volume-button control on, volume up counts in and volume down counts out, and the counter shows how many are inside now. If people may leave before anyone arrives, allow values below the starting value in the counter’s settings.

Does it work without signal? Everything does. There is no account and no sign-in; counters and their history live on the phone.

Can I prove the number afterwards? The history keeps the time of every tap. Export it to CSV, or to PDF with Premium, and the count arrives with the sequence that produced it.

Two of us at two doors? Each of you counts your own door on your own phone. Add the totals afterwards from the exports. There is no live sync between phones.

Can I count without looking at the screen? That is what the volume buttons and the vibration are for. The Apple Watch app and the home-screen widget cover the moments the phone is not in your hand at all.

Start at the next door

Make one counter before the next event, name it for the door, turn on the volume buttons and set the capacity as the goal. Then count the room once and look at the history afterwards. A count with a time on every tap is a different thing from a number on a dial.

Counting people is one of fifteen things a tally counter does well. Get Tally Counter for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Android, or look through what it does first.