FRAMES documentation

How FRAMES fits together

FRAMES is two pieces. The portal is this website: people, events, rules, reports and billing. The kiosk app is an Android app on a phone or tablet at your entrance: it recognises faces and scans ticket QR codes. They sync over the internet, and the device keeps working when that connection drops.

Four things the rest of this document keeps referring to:

• Location — a place attendance happens, like Main Entrance or Warehouse. A label you choose; FRAMES never reads GPS.
• Device — one Android kiosk, bound to your organization and assigned to a location. Its code is stamped on every record it writes.
• People — your staff, enrolled with a face. Event attendees are separate and never count against your staff limit.
• Credit — one balance that pays for everything: the monthly plan fee and event check-ins.

Accounts and roles

Signing up creates your organization and makes you its first administrator. Invite colleagues from Settings → Administrators; each one sets their own password from an emailed link, and nobody can sign in until their email is verified.

Everything an administrator changes is recorded under Settings → Audit Logs with who did it and when.

Devices

Install the app from Google Play. Google Play keeps it updated, so an entrance tablet stays current without anyone visiting it. On first launch it downloads a face-recognition model of about 250 MB, once per device — do that on Wi-Fi, in advance.

Binding a device

Create the device under Settings → Devices, then click QR and scan that code from the app. The QR carries the server address and a one-time binding code that expires after 30 minutes; generate a fresh one whenever you need it. Binding also sends the device your staff list, so recognition works immediately.

What is on the device

• Event check-in — scan ticket QR codes. Shows a badge when the device is deployed to an event.
• Staff attendance — recognise faces and record clock-ins.
• People — enrol staff and manage their face records.
• Today — check-ins recorded on this device today.
• Settings — server, sync, device and face model. Protected by an admin PIN you set on the device, so a kiosk left on a counter cannot be reconfigured by whoever picks it up.

You can lock the device to the scanning screen so it cannot be navigated away from — the right setting for an unattended gate.

Staff attendance

The daily job: people arrive, the kiosk recognises them, and you get hours you can defend. Nobody types a PIN and nobody signs a sheet.

Enrolling faces

Add people in the portal under Staff Attendance → Users & Groups, or create them on the device as you enrol. On the device, People → Add takes one photo and turns it into a numeric template — a list of numbers describing the face. Recognition compares templates, on the device, and a template cannot be turned back into a photograph.

One profile photo is uploaded with the person so other kiosks can show their face at check-in. The frames the camera sees while recognising are never uploaded and never stored.

Groups let you treat departments as one thing — assigning a working-hours rule to Warehouse is one action rather than forty.

Working hours

A rule under Staff Attendance → Rules says which days somebody works, their start and end times, and a grace period — the minutes after the start time that still count as on time. Rules are assigned to people or to groups, and somebody with no rule still has their attendance recorded; it simply is not measured against anything.

Attendance and timesheets

• Attendance — one day at a time: who arrived, when, at which device, and who is missing.
• Timesheet — hours per person across a date range, which is what payroll asks for.
• Attendee detail and the dashboard summarise trends across locations.

Both export to Excel. Exports contain what is on screen for the range you chose, so a filtered view exports filtered.

Holidays and leave

Record public holidays and approved leave under Staff Attendance → Holidays & Leave. A day that is a holiday, or a person who is on approved leave, reads as such in the reports rather than as an unexplained absence — which is the difference between a report you can act on and one somebody has to annotate by hand every month.

Events

Conferences, training days, AGMs, graduations: people register, get a QR ticket, and are checked in at the door. Events need no plan and no subscription — they are paid from credit at a fixed rate per person per day, charged the first time each person is scanned in.

Creating an event

Events → Create event walks through four steps:

1. Details — name, dates, daily opening and closing times. Scans outside those hours are refused and not recorded; the device says when the event opens.
2. Registration — whether people register themselves, and what you ask them. You can build the form field by field, or have FRAMES draft one for you.
3. Ticket checkpoints — the gates and doors tickets are scanned at: Main Entrance, Lunch, Hall B.
4. Points & rules — how each checkpoint behaves. See scan rules.

Every event is created with a test ticket so you can rehearse the gate without registering a real person, and it costs nothing.

Registration and tickets

Share the event's public link, or embed the form. Registrants receive a QR ticket by email. You can require approval, in which case tickets are issued only once you approve — useful when places are limited or invitations are personal.

• Walk-ins — register somebody at the door from Registrants → Add walk-in; they get a ticket immediately.
• Import — bring an existing list in from a spreadsheet.
• QR pack — download every ticket as printable files, for an audience that does not use email.
• Categories — Delegate, Speaker, Staff. A checkpoint can admit only certain categories, which is how a green room stays a green room.

Public forms can carry your logo and colours, and the ticket email can be branded to match.

Sending devices to a gate

Under the event's Device deployments tab, send a device to the event and choose which checkpoint it is. The device picks the deployment up on its next sync and shows the event on its home screen. One device can only be one checkpoint at a time — that is what makes "already scanned at this checkpoint" meaningful.

Scan rules and refusals

Each checkpoint has its own rules, set when you create the event and editable afterwards.

When a ticket is refused the device says why, in words the person holding it can act on: already used, outside the scan window, wrong category for this checkpoint, too soon after the last scan, daily limit reached, or the event has not opened yet. The same rules are evaluated on the device and on the server, so an offline gate behaves exactly like an online one.

On the day

Tap Event check-in and scan. The screen shows a large clear result — admitted, with the person's name and details you chose to display, or refused with the reason. A refusal needs a tap to clear, so nobody walks through on a glance.

No ticket to hand? Type the last 8 digits of their phone number on the scanning screen and FRAMES finds their registration. The search starts on its own once you have typed 8 digits, works with or without a leading zero, and shows their details for you to confirm before admitting them. If they have already been checked in, it says who they are and when.

What the kiosk displays on a successful scan is yours to choose under the event's Settings tab — name and organisation at a conference, name and seat elsewhere, or as little as possible for a privacy-sensitive audience.

Reminders and feedback

The Reminders tab sends a reminder email to everyone holding a ticket — the message is fixed and carries the event's own details, so a reminder cannot turn into a newsletter. It tells you how many days remain and will not send twice on the same day by accident.

After the event, the Feedback tab sends a short survey, again when you decide to. FRAMES tracks who has received it, so nobody is asked twice, and responses appear on the same tab and as a sheet in the event export.

What an event costs

Check-in is charged per person per day, taken the first time that person is scanned on that day. Scanning them again at another checkpoint the same day costs nothing, and somebody who registers and never arrives costs nothing at all.

The event's Cost tab shows the worst case if everyone attends every day, what has actually been spent so far, and what your balance still buys. If you are short, it says so before the day rather than at the door.

Credit, plans and payment

One balance pays for everything. Top it up under Settings → Billing & Plan:

• Card, through PayPal. No PayPal account needed.
• Mobile money, for Sierra Leone: Orange Money or Afrimoney. You get a short code to dial on the phone holding the wallet; the credit appears as soon as it clears. You can close the page — the payment keeps going.

Credit never expires. Every payment has a PDF receipt, downloadable from the Payment history tab.

Plans

Staff attendance runs on a monthly plan, whose fee comes out of your credit when you choose it and again each month. A plan sets how many employees, devices and locations you may have and which extras are included.

Events need no plan at all. An organization with credit and no plan can create events, take registrations, deploy a kiosk and scan tickets — all of it paid per person per day. A plan that has lapsed takes away staff attendance: face recognition, attendance reports and timesheets. It never touches your events.

• Upgrading takes effect immediately. You pay only the difference for the days left in the current period, and your renewal date does not move.
• Downgrading waits for your next renewal, so you keep what you have already paid for.
• Turning off renewal keeps access until the end of the period you have paid for. Nothing is deleted, and leftover credit still pays for event check-ins.
• If a renewal cannot be paid, staff attendance continues for a short grace period (three days by default) with a warning, then stops until you top up. The moment credit arrives the fee is taken and attendance resumes. Events keep running throughout.

Offline and syncing

The device holds its own copy of the people and tickets it needs, so scanning works with no internet at all. Records queue on the device and upload when it reconnects — minutes or hours later, in order, without duplicates.

What is affected while offline:

• Face recognition — unaffected. It always runs on the device.
• Ticket scanning — works. Whether a ticket the device cannot verify is admitted is your offline policy for that checkpoint.
• Tickets used at another gate — a device cannot know about those until it syncs. Multiple gates on the same network stay in step within seconds; a gate on no network catches up when it reconnects.
• Enrolling and binding — these need the server.

Data and privacy

• Face templates, not photographs. Recognition uses a numeric template computed on the device; it cannot be turned back into an image. Camera frames from recognition are never uploaded.
• One profile photo per enrolled person is uploaded, so other kiosks can show who was recognised.
• Deleting a person removes their face data everywhere — the server and every device that holds it, on their next sync.
• Your data is yours. Organizations are isolated from each other in the database itself, not merely by a filter in the application.
• Adults only. FRAMES must not be used to enrol anyone under 18. Schools and colleges are welcome to use it for teaching and support staff.

The full terms are in the privacy policy and terms of use. For a data request, email privacy@maxcit.com.

Troubleshooting

Anything else: info@maxcit.com, +232 72 667 635, or WhatsApp.