You have a great Saturday. Lot's full by 10:00 AM, cars lined up to the road, your crew hustling the whole day. Then Monday you pull the deposit and it's lower than it should be, and if someone asked you exactly where the rest went, you'd have a hard time answering.
Most of it comes back to the same thing. You can't actually prove who paid and who didn't.
The kiosks are supposed to help with all that, and honestly they've caused us as many problems as they solved. Some days the machine just won't cooperate. It's out of paper, or the card reader's being difficult, or it eats the transaction and never spits out a receipt. But the bigger issue is what happens when the thing works fine. Your staff walk the lot looking for receipts on dashboards, and half the time there's nothing to see. The slip's flipped face down. It slid off onto the floor. It's in the guy's pocket while he's down at the water. Or he never paid and he's banking on nobody walking back to check. A car that paid and a car that didn't look the same from the aisle.
And that's really the whole problem, because it means you can't enforce anything. If you're going to write a ticket or turn somebody around, you'd better be right that they didn't pay. Nobody wants to get into it with a family that already paid, standing there in the parking lot with the kids watching. So when your staff aren't sure, and with a kiosk they're basically never sure, they let it go. A blank dashboard doesn't prove a thing.
People notice. The regulars figure out pretty quick that skipping the kiosk doesn't cost them anything, and once a few of them stop paying, more follow. That's how so many pay-and-display lots end up under 60% compliance. It's not that folks are out to cheat you. It's just that the setup doesn't give your people any way to tell who's who, and no way to do much about it even when they can.
You can't fix this by leaning on your staff to try harder. They're already working hard, and it's not their fault the gate can't tell them anything useful. It doesn't remember who came through, it can't spot a tag that's been passed around, and it can't tell the person in the booth whether the car in front of them is square or not.
That's what we built Yodel to handle. The payment's tied to the plate, so there's no paper slip to lose or fake, and your attendant can run a plate and know right away whether that car's paid. Passes use a code that rolls over every few seconds, so nobody's sharing one around. And you can see what's been paid against what's actually parked out there while the gate's still open, instead of finding out Monday.
The funny thing is, once people realize the gate can actually tell, most of them just pay. Turns out that's where a lot of the missing money was sitting the whole time.
The crowd was never the problem here. Getting people to show up is the hard part, and you've already done it. It's just worth knowing where the money slips out on the way in, because you earned most of it already.
If you've never sat down and put a number on what low compliance costs you over a season, that's worth doing. It tends to be bigger than people expect.