For gaming lounges
Time is the product, so it is priced, timed and billed like one.
A PlayStation, a billiards table, a karaoke room, a private room and a meeting room are resources with sessions of their own — started, paused, resumed, extended and stopped — and the charge they produce lands on the same check as the coffee.
01
A resource is a first-class record, not a product with a stopwatch
Consoles, billiards tables, karaoke rooms, private rooms, meeting rooms and kids areas are all the same kind of record: a name, a code, a capacity, a state, a QR token and a free-form metadata column, sitting inside an area on a floor of a branch. They appear on the floor plan next to the tables because they are the same kind of object on it.
- A resource has its own state — available, reserved, in use, paused, maintenance, out of service — separate from whether a session is running on it.
- Scanning a resource’s QR code opens a session with no table behind it, which is the case a table-shaped system cannot express.
- A session records how many people are on the resource, which is what makes a four-controller hour different from a one-controller hour if you want it to be.
- A resource lives in an area, so the same scope rules that decide who may serve the terrace decide who may run the gaming room.
02
The clock stops when you pause it
A session runs scheduled, active, paused, ended or cancelled, and the billable time is accumulated across segments rather than measured from start to finish. A pause is not a note in a comment field: the seconds stop, and the segment that just ended is written down with who ended it.
- Start, pause, resume, extend and stop are five separate operations, each of them auditable.
- The session keeps a running total of billable seconds plus the history of the segments that produced it, so a disputed bill can be walked back.
- A remaining-time notice goes out before the clock runs down, and a session nobody came back to is closed by a sweep rather than left running overnight.
- A shared area does not go to paused because one person in it paused.
03
Five ways to price a minute
A pricing rule bills per minute, per half hour, per hour, at a fixed duration or at one flat price. It can carry a minimum number of minutes, and it can be limited to particular days of the week and a window inside the day. Where two rules cover the same moment, the one with the higher priority wins — which is what peak pricing is here.
- A minimum is applied first and the rounding second, and time always rounds up to the unit that was started: on a per-hour rule, sixty-one minutes is two hours.
- Peak and off-peak are not a switch. A peak price is an ordinary rule with a day-and-time window and a higher priority, which is more work to set up and much less to explain afterwards.
- The arithmetic lives in one shared module that the cashier, the waiter’s tablet and the server all call, so the number quoted at the table is the number on the bill.
- The finished charge is posted to the check as a time charge, alongside the food, rather than into a separate takings book.
04
Prepaid packages draw minutes from a balance
A package is a sellable thing that issues entitlements — some of them goods, some of them time. A time entitlement carries a number of minutes and the minutes consumed so far, and it can be scoped to one specific resource or to every resource of a type, so "two hours of PlayStation" does not mean "two hours of that one machine in the corner".
- An entitlement walks from issued through partly consumed to consumed, expired or cancelled, so a half-used package is a state rather than a note.
- A package can be valid for a number of minutes from issue, or for the current visit only.
- A running session names the entitlement it is drawing from, so the balance goes down as the session runs rather than in a reconciliation afterwards.
- Before a session starts, a preview answers what the guest’s package would actually cover right now — how many minutes remain, how many this session would draw, and when they expire.
05
One evening, one bill, however many machines it took
A visit is a place, a check is money, and a timed resource can be run as part of a table. So a family holding an indoor table, a console in the gaming room and a child in the kids area closes on one bill without anyone describing the family to the software first — there is no group to build and no host to nominate, and the bill still splits whichever way they want to pay.
- A visit has exactly one master check, and the master belongs to the visit rather than to the table — which is what stops the group that sits down next from inheriting the last one’s running total.
- A timed session names the table it is being run as part of, and that is the whole of what decides where its minutes land: four consoles started against table twelve all bill to table twelve’s open check, and nobody types a name.
- A charge is its own record and names the check it currently belongs to, so charges move between bills without orders being recreated — and merging two checks repoints the charges, the payments, the orders and the running timers together.
- A check that still owes money refuses to close and names what is outstanding, and stopping a timer writes its charge in the same transaction as the stop — so a stopped clock with no money against it is not a state this system has. A bill reached through a visit cannot outlive it either: a console left running past closing has nowhere to post, rather than landing an hour of play on whoever sits down in the morning.
06
Booked in advance, or seated off the street
A booking names either a table or a resource — exactly one, and a request that names both is refused — with a headcount, a start and an optional end. Availability is answered by naming the bookings a new one would overlap rather than by refusing without saying why, so the person on the phone can offer the half hour either side instead of just saying no.
- Seating a table booking opens the visit on that table; seating a booking against a console starts its timed session already ticking, because the guest is standing at the machine. Either way the guest who booked an hour ago is not typed in again at the door.
- A booking against a console and a booking against a table are the same record, so a family that wants a table at eight and a machine at nine is one screen rather than two systems.
- A booking nobody arrives for is recorded as a no-show rather than quietly disappearing from the evening, which is what makes the pattern visible when it becomes one.
- The walk-up is the same path without the booking: start the session on the machine, and the rule that covers that moment is pinned to it there and then — so a session that runs across the start of peak bills at the price it was quoted.
Questions about billing time
Is a guest charged for the time a machine was paused?
No. Billable time is accumulated across the segments a session actually ran for, not measured from the moment it started to the moment it stopped. Pause and resume are recorded operations, each segment is written down with who performed it, and the running total the bill is computed from is the sum of those segments. If a console was paused for twenty minutes while the family ate, those twenty minutes are not in the total.
How is a part hour billed?
It is rounded up to the unit that was started, after any minimum has been applied. A per-hour rule bills sixty-one minutes as two hours and a per-half-hour rule bills thirty-one minutes as two blocks; a fixed-duration package bills at least one whole block even for a session that lasted seconds. The minimum minutes on a rule are applied before the rounding, not after, so the two do not compound into a surprise.
Can a guest book a console in advance?
Yes. A booking names either a table or a resource — exactly one, and a request that names both is refused — with a headcount, a start and an optional end, and an availability check that reports the bookings it would overlap rather than just refusing. Seating a booking against a console starts its timed session in the same step, already ticking, because the guest is standing at the machine; seating a table booking opens the visit on the table instead. A booking nobody arrives for is recorded as a no-show, which is what turns an occasional annoyance into a pattern you can see.
Bring your worst Friday night.
Four consoles, a billiards table, a family that wants one bill and a group that wants four. That is the walkthrough worth having, against your venue rather than a demo one.
A time, a screen share, and your own floor plan on the screen.
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