Frequently asked questions

What FinishLine is

FinishLine turns the phones your crew already carries into a connected meet timing system. Each volunteer's device joins the same meet and takes one position: the starting gun, a lane at the finish, the photo-finish camera, or the results. Every device measures against one shared clock, so a time captured at the finish is comparable to the instant the gun fired a hundred meters away.

What comes out is a finished result rather than a number to be read out and typed up later. Results land as the meet runs, families can follow them from the stands in a browser, and nothing has to be transcribed on Monday.

There is no rig to buy, wire, or transport. Optional accuracy features, a start that hears the gun itself and a photo-finish camera that reads the whole line, are part of the app rather than paid add-ons.

The meets it is built for

• Youth and club leagues replacing a bag of stopwatches, paper slips, and a spreadsheet two days later.
• Small high school and middle school programs that cannot justify buying or renting a hardware timing system for the number of meets they run.
• Cross country, all-comers meets, and community races, where the field starts together on one gun, is too large for lanes, and gets its bibs sorted out after the finish rather than before the gun.
• Meets that need the times to hold up: a small crew built around the gun and the camera, which removes human reaction from both ends of the race.
• One coach, one parent, or one athlete with a single device and no account, timing a workout or a time trial properly instead of on a wristwatch.

Most programs run more than one of these across a season. See three ways to run a meet for the crew shapes and what each one costs you in people and in turnaround.

Can I use it for a sport other than track?

Likely, if the sport is timed rather than measured. Every result here is a time, so there is nowhere for a mark to go, which rules out the throws and the jumps even at a track meet. Past that, very little is track-specific: event names are free text, a heat is either laned or an unlaned pack, and lane counts go up to 12.

Swimming is the closest fit, being laned, heated, age-grouped, and purely timed. Rowing and paddling sprints, BMX, open-water swimming, and mass-start nordic skiing pass the same tests.

What events can FinishLine time is the full answer: the four tests, a sport-by-sport table, and the ceilings worth knowing before you plan a meet around one of them.

Can I time a 5k, a marathon, or a cross-country race?

It turns on one question, and it is neither the distance nor the size of the field: does every runner's clock start at the same instant?

Every result is measured from one start instant shared by the whole heat. So races scored on gun time fit, and races that give each runner an individual start over a timing mat, producing a net time, do not.

• Cross country fits well. The field goes together from one line on a single gun. Where an XC meet uses chip timing, the chips are read at the finish rather than at the start.
• A large road race does not. Runners cross a start mat individually, sometimes minutes after the gun, and there is nowhere in the app for a per-runner start to live.
• A small road race often does. Start mats cost money and plenty of local races skip them, so everybody's clock starts at the gun and chip time simply is gun time.

See what events can FinishLine time for the rest, cycling included, and run a pack heat for how a mass-start finish is captured.

Do I need special timing hardware?

No. FinishLine runs on the phones and tablets your crew already has, plus your usual starting pistol if you use one. There is no finish-line rig to buy or wire, and no beam, pad, or external trigger is supported today. See do I need timing hardware.

How many devices do I need?

More than one. Timing a meet is a team effort with each position on its own device.

The minimum is a coordinator plus one of two finish arrangements: a timer on every lane, or a single photo-finish camera with a separate bib collector. Adding a device at the start and a device on results makes every other job easier. See how many devices do I need.

Does everyone need an account?

No. Only the coordinator needs a subscription. Everyone else joins with a four-character code, as themselves, with no sign-up, on whatever phone is in their pocket.

Connected device limits are 10 on the trial and 20 on a Team subscription. The free standalone timer is a single device and needs no account at all.

Who does what during a meet?

Each device picks a role as it joins, and that decides which screen it gets and which part of a result it is responsible for. Roles belong to devices rather than to people, so a volunteer who has to leave can hand their position to someone else.

See roles and responsibilities for the five roles, the sub-roles that split the start line and the finish chute, and where the work goes when you are short-handed.

How do bibs get collected in lane heats and pack heats?

Both styles end with a bib on every result. What changes is when the bib gets attached.

Lane heats assign athletes to lanes during setup, before the race, so each lane's finish timer already knows whose time it is capturing. Pack heats have no lanes: one operator taps each crossing to record the order and the times, and a second collects bibs afterward at the chute. See collecting bibs in lane heats vs. pack heats.

A crossing with no bib on it is still recorded as a real time with an unknown runner, so nobody has to hold up the meet to chase down a runner who lost their bib.

Do families need the app to see results?

No. Families follow the live heat and browse full results in any web browser, with no account and nothing to install. Send them a link and they are done. They can also follow your team in the app, which puts your results on their home screen after each meet. See how families follow results.

Do I need special network equipment at the track?

No. Your devices need a normal mobile connection, and that is the whole requirement. No track Wi-Fi, no hub, no base station.

Coverage at fields is not always good, so every device holds its own captures and catches up when the connection returns. A brief outage costs you live updates rather than results. See connectivity at the track.

How do all the devices stay in sync?

Every device continuously checks itself against one shared time source rather than trusting its own clock, so separate phones measure from the same starting instant.

With a device at the start, the start time comes from the gun, and the acoustic start can take it from the sound of the shot rather than from someone reacting to it. Without one, each finish timer taps at the gun and the app takes the median of those taps as the heat's official start, which hands every lane the same start instant instead of six different ones. See how clock sync works.

What is photo finish, and is it an extra?

One device, mounted and aimed at the line, images a single thin line at the finish as fast as its camera can, up to 240 times a second, and stacks those slices into a strip whose horizontal axis is time. The operator marks each crossing on the strip, and the marked time carries no human reaction at all.

It is part of the app at every level, including the free standalone timer. The app shows the uncertainty of each mark rather than quoting a precision the capture cannot support. See how the photo finish camera works.

What is the largest source of error?

People, not clocks. A finger tap lands roughly 150 to 250 milliseconds after the thing it is timing, and that delay varies from heat to heat, which is worse than being consistently late.

That is why the two accuracy features target the two ends of the race: the acoustic start removes the delay between the gun firing and someone pressing a button, and photo finish removes it at the line. Everything else in the timing chain is smaller than the human in it.

Can I try it without a crew?

Yes. The free standalone timer is one device, no account, and works fully offline. It carries your own events, age groups, and bibs, so every time it records means something later, and it keeps both ways of timing: the acoustic start and photo finish are not paid features.

What it does not do is publish. There is no team page, no family following along, and no CSV export, because there is no account to attach any of it to. It is a permanent free tier rather than a countdown to a paywall. The solo section of three ways to run a meet lists the limits in full.

Still stuck?

Email support@finishlinetimer.com and we will get back to you. Timing a meet right now? Tell us what you are seeing and we will help you keep going.