Our newest feature lets institutions capture demand that would otherwise walk away — and give customers a structured path back to the queue when capacity opens.
Queue management systems are good at handling the people who are present. But there's a category of demand that traditional systems don't address: people who want to be served but can't wait right now.
At a hospital OPD that opens at 8am, patients who arrive before the building opens have nowhere to go — so they crowd the entrance, which creates disorder from the moment the doors unlock. At a university registration desk on the first day of term, the queue fills within an hour and students who arrive later are simply turned away with no structured way to return.
Waitlists are designed for exactly this situation.
A waitlist is a holding structure that sits alongside your queue. When your queue is full or closed, customers can join the waitlist instead of being turned away entirely. Their position in the waitlist is tracked, they receive a reference, and when capacity opens — either because a queue spot becomes available or because the service resumes — they can be transferred from the waitlist into the active queue.
The transition is managed by staff through the LineUp dashboard. A single click moves a waitlist entry into the queue at the appropriate position. The customer receives an SMS notification that they've been activated and should proceed to the service point.
The feature was piloted with three institutions during development:
• A government licensing office that previously had queues forming before 6am. The office now opens its waitlist digitally at 7am, captures registrations before the building opens, and activates entries in batches as desks open.
• A hospital that runs a fixed number of consultation slots per session. When all slots for the morning session are taken, overflow patients join the waitlist for the afternoon session rather than being told to come back tomorrow.
• A university that runs high-demand registration processes during intake week. Department coordinators manage the waitlist to ensure every student who attempts to register is given a structured path to completion, even if they can't be served immediately.
The most significant operational change is that 'we're full' stops meaning 'come back later and hope'. Instead it means 'we have your information, we know where you are in the order, and we'll notify you when you can be seen'.
For institutions that care about service equity, this matters. Without a waitlist, capacity constraints favour whoever arrives earliest or pushes hardest. With a waitlist, order is preserved and visible, and the institution has a record of every person who wanted to be served — not just the ones who made it through.
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