Nothing moves without leaving a record.
Pull the trigger on a Bluetooth gun, point a phone at a label, or type the tag — from any screen in the app. The code resolves to the actual item, case, or shelf, an info card pops with one-tap actions, and the action is written to an audit row stamped with who did it, when, and which show it was for. Names come from the database, not from the person scanning.
The truck leaves and the record leaves with it.
Somebody ticked a printed list, somebody else loaded three cases that weren't on it, and the sheet is now in a jacket pocket in a different state. Two days later a wireless pack is missing. Who had it? Which show did it go on? Did it come back and get put on the wrong shelf, or is it still in a ballroom in Tampa? Nobody can answer, so the shop buys another one and the same thing happens next season.
The version with barcodes is often no better — a scanner tied to one laptop at one desk, so the crew stops walking back to it and starts calling out tags instead.
With GigPal PRO: every scan carries a person, a timestamp, a device and a show, the gun works on whatever screen the crew is already looking at, and a scan taken with no signal still lands with the time it actually happened.
From trigger pull to signed record.
Scan from wherever you're standing.
A Bluetooth or USB gun in HID mode types the code like a keyboard, so the app listens for a burst of keystrokes arriving under 150ms apart and ending in Enter — that's a machine, not a person. No field to click into first. On a phone, the camera reads QR and five barcode formats. On a desktop station, type the tag and hit enter. Whichever you use, the same popup answers, on whatever screen you happened to be on.
The code resolves to a real thing — or says it doesn't.
Your printed labels carry a QR holding your own web address plus ?tag=, so a stranger who finds a road case can scan it with a plain phone camera and land on your site. Inside the app that same code is stripped back to the tag, uppercased, and matched against gear, then cases, then shelf locations. Nothing matches? You get a card that says so plainly and offers to search inventory for it — and that miss is deliberately not written to the audit, because a mis-read barcode isn't custody history.
Load-out has a direction, and it won't let you flip it by accident.
The scan screen is explicitly LOADING OUT or STRIKING IN — never guessing. Scanning something twice in the same direction confirms it (✓ ALREADY OUT) instead of flipping it back, so a crew can re-scan a case to double-check without un-loading the truck. Arrive at a gig that's already more than half out and it opens in STRIKING IN for you. And if two scans in a row come back already done, a banner offers to switch modes in one tap — because that's exactly what a whole truck being struck in the wrong mode looks like from the outside.
Strike into whatever case is closest.
Reality at 1am is that a video wall goes into whichever box is nearest the door. Scan a case, hit FILL THIS CASE, then scan gear as it physically goes in — each piece moves into that case and out of the one it used to live in, so the manifests follow the truck instead of the plan. Scan a different case label and the fill target switches mid-flow. Gear hard-wired into a flypack isn't a dead end either: you're offered a temporary borrow, and the confirmation tells you plainly whether it was borrowed or moved for good, so nobody goes looking for it at the wrong case next week.
Read it back by person, by show, by tag.
Every scan lands in a live feed with the person, the station it came from, the show, and how long ago. Tap a name to see only their scans, or search a tag, an item or a person across the history. Other people's scans arrive within about five seconds while the dashboard is open; your own show instantly. When a gig is archived, its scans move with it into that event's permanent record rather than piling up in the live feed forever — no cutoff timer that could file away a show you're still chasing.
The parts that decide whether you can trust it.
The name isn't typed in
Who scanned is stamped by the database from the signed-in session, not sent up by the app — so it can't be spoofed by whoever is holding the gun. A readable display name rides along for fast reads, and a crew member can change their own name without being able to touch their own role.
Loading dock, no bars, scan still counts
When a write can't reach the network it queues on the device stamped with the real time it happened, then replays when signal returns. The audit trail stays honest instead of showing forty scans all landing at once in the hotel lobby an hour later. Logging is also non-fatal by design: a logging hiccup never interrupts scanning at a busy table.
One trigger pull, one row
Guns routinely fire the same code twice per pull. A short window swallows the echo without blocking a deliberate re-scan a moment later — and the camera, which sees the same barcode every frame while it's in view, gets its own separate rule. Without this, a shop's audit doubles every count and a unique item toggles straight back in.
Scanner Mode for iPad and iPhone
iOS only delivers a Bluetooth gun's keystrokes when something is focused. Arm Scanner Mode with a tap and the app parks a hidden, keyboard-suppressed field that catches scans anywhere — no on-screen keyboard popping up over the pack list. It also holds a screen wake lock, so a tech-table display doesn't go dark halfway through a load-out.
The right screen gets the scan
When a dedicated scan function is open — scanning into a pack list, checking a case — the app-wide listener stands down so the scan isn't handled twice. A focused text field always receives its own scan directly. That's why the global info card never pops up over someone who's already mid-scan.
A junk barcode can't kill the scanner
A code carrying a malformed escape sequence used to throw out of the decode loop and leave the camera showing live video that would never scan again. Decoding now handles every case, and the loop keeps going no matter what happens inside it. One damaged label costs you one scan, not the rest of the session.
Crew move gear; crew don't edit inventory
Custody writes go through narrow database functions that only touch live out/in state, locked to the workspace the person actually belongs to. Inventory, cases and pack lists stay manager-write. A freelancer can scan a whole show out without being able to change what you own or what it's worth.
The correction is logged too
Every scan in the running feed has an UNDO that writes the previous quantities back. It doesn't erase the mistake — it records the reversal as its own entry, so the history shows what happened and who fixed it rather than a tidied-up version that nobody can reconstruct later.
- Four ways in
- Bluetooth/USB gun (HID keyboard wedge, keystrokes under 150ms apart), phone or tablet camera, the global scan button on every screen, or a typed tag. All four land in the same resolver and the same audit.
- Codes read
- QR, Code 128, Code 39, EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A. Browsers with a built-in barcode engine decode about ten frames a second; iPhone and Firefox fall back to a bundled decoder plus a dedicated QR reader for dense labels, loaded only when the camera is actually used.
- What a label holds
- Your own web address plus ?tag= in the QR — so a found case leads a stranger back to you. Bare barcodes are the tag itself; shelf labels encode LOC: and the location name. Matching is case-insensitive throughout.
- Every audit row
- Action (out · in · case · location · info · service), the tag, the item name, the show it belonged to, the person, the station label for that device, and the timestamp. Rows are readable only by members of that workspace.
- Actions off one scan
- Check out to a show, check back in, add to a case (move or borrow), queue a label for printing, start a repack, open the full item record, or jump to that case or shelf.
- Shift check-in
- Optional, off by default. Point a station at a show, crew check in with a rotating code that's only valid for 15 minutes, and a 12-hour shift starts. After that, checking out gear is one tap — no show picker — and it attributes to the right event automatically.
Proof of who had it last.
Put a gun in a crew member's hand.
Print labels for a shelf's worth of gear, pair a Bluetooth scanner, and run one load-out against a real show this week.
Get Started → Supported hardware →