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Business Owner — Complete Guide

You signed up to run WiFi at your own café, hotel, clinic, or co-working space. This guide walks the eleven screens you'll use day-to-day to bill customers, hand out vouchers, and keep the network healthy — solo, no team needed.

1. Who this guide is for

You're a single-location business owner who signed up to WitRADIUS directly. You run the WiFi yourself — no operations team, no franchisees. Maybe you're:

  • A café owner offering paid WiFi to walk-ins
  • A hotel manager billing guests per night for in-room internet
  • A clinic giving free WiFi but tracking usage to control bandwidth
  • A co-working space selling daily/monthly passes
  • An apartment building with shared internet you bill tenants for

WitRADIUS gives you a self-service control panel that handles every step: configure the router, design the splash page, define WiFi products, generate voucher codes, print them, and bill the customer. You're the cashier, the IT admin, and the owner — all in one dashboard.

Your scope

You see eleven menu items grouped by purpose:

GroupMenu items
OperationsDashboard, Hotspots, Login Pages, Profiles, Batches, Printing Templates, WiFi Users, Sessions
InsightsStatistics, Traffic Accounting
MoneyMy Billing
ProcurementHardware

That's everything for a single-location business. No menus you don't need, no clutter.

What's different from an Admin account

An "Admin" account is for service providers running multiple businesses or sub-letting access to operators/distributors. As a Business Owner you have:

  • ❌ No "Sub-admins" screen (no team to manage)
  • ❌ No "Operators" or "Distributors" (no front-desk staff or resellers)
  • ❌ No batch deletion (you can edit and re-export, but if a batch needs to truly disappear, email support — this prevents accidental destruction of voucher records)
  • ❌ No printing-template deletion (same reason)
  • ❌ No ZeroTier admin (your private network mesh is auto-managed)
  • ✅ Everything else identical to an Admin's self-managed scope

If you outgrow this and need staff or want to sub-let, email [email protected] and we'll upgrade your account to Admin tier.

Your server is auto-provisioned

When you signed up, WitRADIUS automatically allocated you a private RADIUS server in our cloud cluster. You don't manage it — it's just there, scaled to your traffic, snapshotted nightly, patched silently. There's no "Servers" screen in your menu because there's nothing for you to configure on the box itself.

2. Dashboard

Your home screen. Open it every morning to see the night's activity, and every evening to see the day's revenue.

What you see

  • Active sessions right now — across all your hotspots
  • Today's revenue — what your voucher sales earned (gross)
  • Codes burned today — useful with revenue to compute average ticket
  • Top batches — which products sold fastest
  • Top users — heaviest data consumers (catch abuse early)
  • Recent activity feed — last logins, last code generations, last errors
  • System status — green = healthy, yellow = degraded, red = call us

The dashboard auto-refreshes. Use the date picker (top-right) to see yesterday, last week, last month — you can compare any two periods side by side.

3. My Billing

This is what YOU owe WitRADIUS for running your hotspots — not what your customers owe you. Two separate worlds.

Sub-tabs

Account balance

Top-up your prepaid balance with a credit card or bank transfer. Recurring monthly hotspot fees are deducted from this balance. Auto-top-up keeps your service from being suspended.

Invoices

Every month an invoice is generated for your active hotspots and any usage-based charges (extra storage, bulk SMS for OTP, etc.). Pay with one click using a saved card, or upload a bank-transfer receipt and our team will mark it paid.

Pricing & estimator

Use the hotspot cost estimator before adding a new hotspot to see exactly what it'll add to your monthly bill. Pricing scales with concurrent online users, not with how many vouchers you sell — so a busy café and a slow café pay the same per location.

Payment methods

Add or remove cards. Set a default. Cards are tokenized — we never see your full PAN.

Switching plans: To upgrade or downgrade your account tier (e.g. add team support to become an Admin), email us. Plan changes are pro-rated manually so you never overpay during a transition.

4. Hotspots

A hotspot is one physical WiFi location: one router (or one mesh) at one address.

Adding a hotspot

  1. Click Add hotspot
  2. Name — friendly label ("Main café", "Pool deck", "Apartment lobby")
  3. Address — full street address; used for tax/accounting and on receipts
  4. Map pin — drag to your exact location. Used in the customer-facing portal map (if enabled) and for support diagnostics
  5. Hardware model — pick from the catalog. We pre-load CoovaChilli on this exact firmware
  6. Login page — pick which captive portal design appears here. (Create your design first — see §5)
  7. Default profile — fallback for any user without a quota assigned
  8. Save. The hotspot appears in the list with status Pending

Provisioning the router

Once the hotspot is saved, you'll see a Provisioning card with three options:

  • Cloud-flash — if you bought the router from us, we ship it pre-flashed. Just plug in
  • DIY flash — download the firmware image, flash it via the manufacturer's recovery mode, then enter the activation code we display
  • Existing OpenWrt — paste a one-line install script into the router's SSH; the script pulls the right CoovaChilli config and registers the device. Status flips to Online

Editing a hotspot

Click any row → edit name, address, login page, default profile, bandwidth caps. Changes apply within ~60 seconds.

Deleting a hotspot

Click delete → confirm twice (irreversible). Active sessions will drop, vouchers tied exclusively to this hotspot become invalid, and billing stops at the next cycle.

Firmware upgrades

The hotspot detail page has a Firmware tab showing current version, latest available, and a one-click upgrade button. We test every firmware release for 14 days on internal hotspots before releasing it to customers.

5. Login Pages

The captive portal — the screen customers see when they first connect to your WiFi.

Templates

We ship several starter templates: minimal, photo-background, hotel, café, voucher-only, form-based, social-login (Facebook, Google). Pick one and customize.

Customizing

The page editor is split into:

  • Branding — logo upload, primary color, fonts
  • Background — solid color, gradient, or image (with optional dark overlay)
  • Auth methods — voucher code, username+password, social login, free with-ads, OTP-by-SMS (additional charges apply for SMS)
  • Languages — toggle which languages the splash shows. Built-in: English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German. Add your own translations under the "Custom strings" panel
  • Terms & conditions — your text or upload a PDF. Customer must check the box to connect
  • Marketing — optional banner shown after login (links to your menu, booking page, social)

Linking to a hotspot

A login page is reusable — design once, attach to many hotspots. Hotspot edit screen → "Login page" dropdown → pick the design.

Deleting

Yes, you can delete login pages you created. Make sure no active hotspots are using a page before deleting it (a confirmation dialog will warn you).

6. Profiles

A profile is a "WiFi product" — what each voucher or registered user gets.

Fields

  • Name — keep it customer-friendly
  • Time quota — total minutes (0 = unlimited)
  • Data quota — total bytes (0 = unlimited)
  • Speed limits — download/upload kbps
  • Concurrent sessions — usually 1
  • Validity window — how long the code remains valid after first use
  • Idle timeout — auto-logout after N minutes inactive
  • Monthly recurring — for prepaid users where quota resets monthly
  • Hotspot scope — restrict to specific locations (default: all)

Common profile setups

  • "1 hour, 500 MB" — daily walk-in customer
  • "24 hour unlimited" — hotel guest
  • "Monthly 50 GB" — apartment tenant
  • "Free 30 minutes / day" — clinic free WiFi with bandwidth cap
  • "Conference 8 hour, 5 Mbps" — temporary event

Use Clone when adding a new profile similar to an existing one.

Deleting profiles

Full delete is supported — but never delete a profile that's in active use; existing vouchers on that profile will fail to authenticate. Wait until they all expire, or migrate users to a new profile first.

7. Batches

The voucher cards you'll sell or hand out.

Creating a batch

  1. Click Add batch
  2. Pick a profile
  3. Pick hotspot(s) (default: all)
  4. Set quantity
  5. Optional: set expiry, batch name, internal notes
  6. Pick a printing template
  7. Generate → codes are created instantly
  8. Print → download the PDF

Editing

Rename the batch, adjust expiry, add notes. The codes themselves cannot be changed — that's by design (audit trail).

What you cannot do here

You cannot delete a batch. The reason is forensic integrity — if a customer disputes a charge a year later, the batch must still exist. If you need a batch removed (e.g. a test-batch from setup day cluttering reports), email support and we'll archive it.

Tracking

Batch list shows: total / used / remaining / revenue / burn rate. Sort by burn rate to spot your best-sellers. Filter by date to see what sold this week.

Voiding & refunding

Open a batch → click any row → Void (invalidate unused) or Refund (credit the customer's wallet if applicable).

Exports

Every batch has Export PDF (the printable cards) and Export CSV (raw codes + status).

8. Printing Templates

Customize how the voucher cards look on paper.

Built-in templates

  • Compact (12 cards / A4)
  • Premium (6 cards / A4 with gradient)
  • Receipt-roll (single column for thermal printers)

Creating your own

Same editor as Admin: page size, cards-per-page, background, logo, font, drag-and-drop text blocks. Save → preview → use in any batch.

Editing

Edit any template you created. Deletion is reserved — same forensic-integrity reason as batches. Email support to remove old templates from your library.

Print quality

  • 600 dpi printer
  • Scratch-off stickers from a stationery shop
  • Front lamination for durability
  • Receipt-roll templates work with Bluetooth thermal printers for mobile sales

9. WiFi Users

Anyone who has ever authenticated at any of your hotspots.

Columns

Username, Profile, MAC, Status (Active / Expired / Disabled / Wallet), Total used, Last seen.

What you can do

  • View full session history per user
  • Edit profile, status, expiry
  • Disable a user (cannot log in until re-enabled)
  • Reset accounting (clear data counter)
  • Delete a stuck session (force disconnect)
  • Top up wallet for prepaid recurring users
  • Delete a user record entirely

Filters

By status, profile, hotspot, date range. Export to CSV for accounting.

10. Sessions

Every authentication produces a session record. Use it for support and audit.

Columns

Username, Hotspot, Started, Stopped, Duration, Bytes in/out, Terminate cause, MAC, IP.

Use cases

  • Customer dispute over time used → look up by MAC, show actual session
  • Customer says "my phone keeps disconnecting" → repeated idle-timeouts = signal issue, not a code issue
  • Outage report → filter to hotspot + time range, count sessions

11. Statistics & Traffic Accounting

Statistics screen

Charts and aggregated reports:

  • Hourly traffic — peak usage times to plan staff or upgrade bandwidth
  • Top users — heaviest consumers (you may want to throttle them or sell them an upgrade)
  • NAS stats — per-router uptime and traffic
  • Online count — historical sessions concurrent over time
  • Downloadable reports — PDF/CSV of any chart for board meetings or tax filings

Traffic Accounting screen

For accounting and billing audits — separate from Statistics:

  • Usage — query traffic by user / hotspot / date range
  • Daily breakdown — daily totals per virtual router
  • Virtual Routers — define logical groupings of physical hotspots for separate accounting (e.g. "Café branch A" vs "Café branch B" if they share a server but bill separately)

Most single-location owners won't need Virtual Routers. Multi-location owners use them to keep per-location accounting clean even though everything runs on one shared server.

12. Hardware

Order routers from us, pre-flashed with the right firmware, shipped ready to plug in.

Catalog

  • Mikrotik hAP ax² / ax³ — small business
  • TP-Link Omada series — mesh / multi-AP buildings
  • Ubiquiti UniFi — large venues
  • Custom — request a quote for unusual hardware

Cart & checkout

Add models to cart, ship to your business address, pay via your account balance or card. Order status shown live: Picking → Flashing → Shipping → Delivered.

Tracking

Shipping tracking link arrives by email. Most regional orders deliver within 3-5 days.

DIY firmware

Don't want to buy from us? Download the firmware image from the Hotspots → Provisioning tab and flash it yourself. We support all hardware in the catalog (and many more — email us to request).

13. Tips & playbook

First week

  1. Add your first hotspot, provision the router, confirm it shows Online
  2. Customize your login page (logo, primary color, T&C)
  3. Create 2-3 starter profiles (e.g. "1 hour", "Daily", "Monthly")
  4. Generate a small test batch (10 codes), print, give yourself a card, connect a phone, walk the full flow. Always test before live launch
  5. Top-up your billing balance enough to cover the first month
  6. Go live!

Daily routine

  • Morning: dashboard glance, system status green, plenty of unused codes in active batches
  • Throughout day: print more vouchers if a batch drops below ~20% remaining
  • Evening: dashboard glance for revenue + sessions, weird patterns?

Monthly routine

  • Pay or auto-pay invoice
  • Review Statistics → top users (any abuse?)
  • Review Statistics → hourly traffic (do I need a faster internet plan?)
  • Export sessions / batches CSV for your accountant

Things you should NEVER do

  • Don't share your login. Use only your own
  • Don't delete a profile that's in active use
  • Don't forget to top-up your balance — service suspends after 7 days unpaid
  • Don't promise customers things the system doesn't deliver. Check the WiFi yourself first

When to upgrade to Admin tier

If you find yourself wanting:

  • A staff member to print vouchers without seeing your billing → you need an Operator
  • A reseller selling your codes at a satellite location → you need a Distributor
  • Multiple businesses you bill separately → you need an Admin account

Email us — upgrade is free, just preserves your existing data.

When to call support

  • WiFi down across multiple hotspots simultaneously
  • Code generation stops working
  • Billing dispute or invoice question
  • Anything else you can't figure out from this guide

[email protected] — we typically reply within a few hours.