Getting started

This is the first article you read. It describes the whole road from an empty account to a ticket on the phone of your first visitor. You need no skills for it: no bookkeeping, no website, no technical knowledge. Anyone who can create an email address can do this.

Allow half a day. Not because it is difficult, but because along the way you have to look a few things up — your official association name, your account number — and because it is better to think about your prices calmly once than hastily three times.

What you need beforehand

• An email address you can get into. Preferably an address belonging to the organisation (info@yourassociation.be) rather than your private address: this becomes the address you sign in with and where confirmations are sent.
• The official name of your organisation, exactly as it appears in the statutes or on your invoices. That name goes on the ticket and on your visitor's invoice.
• The address of your organisation: street, number, postcode, town.
• Possibly your company number and your VAT number. If you do not have them, that is no problem — many informal associations have neither. See Setting up your organisation.
• A bank account in the name of the organisation. You need that at your payment provider, not here. A private account works technically, but your treasurer and your auditor will thank you for not doing it.
• A smartphone for the door, if you want to scan tickets.
• Roughly half a day, and preferably well before your event.

You create the account itself with the wizard at /en/get-started; below you read where to begin.

What you have afterwards

When you are done, you have three things. That is all there is, and all you need.

1. One link. One web address you share everywhere: on social media, in the newsletter, on a poster as a QR code, in the club's group chat. Anyone who clicks it sees your tickets and can pay straight away.
2. A ticket with a QR code in your visitor's mailbox. Automatically, within seconds of the payment. You do not have to send anything, print anything or keep track of anything.
3. A phone at the door that says yes or no. Your volunteer points the camera at the visitor's QR code. Green: come in. Red: this ticket has already been used, or it does not belong to tonight.

What you do not have to do

This is here because people are often pleasantly surprised by it.

• You do not have to install software to sell. The back office and your ticket shop run in an ordinary web browser, on any computer at all. Only for scanning at the door do you put an app on a phone.
• You do not have to sign a contract with a bank. You work with a payment provider — a company that handles the card payment for you. You sign up online, usually in half an hour. See What is a payment provider.
• You do not have to have a website. Your ticket shop is a website. If you do have one, you can place the shop inside it, but you need not.
• You do not have to buy ticket paper, a printer or a till. The ticket lives on your visitor's phone.
• You do not have to finish everything at once. The six steps below may be spread over several days. The system remembers where you left off.

First: create your account

If you do not have an account yet, start there. The Get started button opens a wizard of six short questions: what kind of organisation you are, what you organise and what you need. At the end it suggests a plan and tells you why — and you are free to pick a different one. Allow two minutes.

Next you confirm your email address with the link in the confirmation email; only then do you get into your back office. What the wizard asks and why is described in Creating your account.

If you already have an account, simply sign in: at the top right of every page on the website there is a Log in link, next to the Get started button. It is at the bottom of the page too, in the footer. If you were invited as a staff member of an organisation that already exists, that organisation is waiting for you after your first sign-in; see Staff and roles.

The rest of this article assumes you are signed in and looking at your dashboard.

The checklist on your dashboard

Sign in and you land on the dashboard. That is your home screen. At the top is the Getting started block with a counter ("3 of 6 steps done"). Every step that is still open is a link that takes you straight to the right screen. The six fixed steps are:

1. Add your venue
2. Create what you sell
3. Add an online price
4. Connect your payment provider
5. Invite your staff
6. Put your shop online

If you ticked time slots, counter sales or your own domain in the wizard, a step is added for each choice: Set up your time slots (which takes you to Time slots), Register your till device (to Devices) and Connect your own domain. You see the block as owner or administrator; a desk member or a scanner does not see it.

Note: you do not set those ticks yourself. The system looks at your data. Only when an active venue really exists does the tick next to "venue" come on. That is deliberate: a tick you can click yourself only says that somebody clicked.

As soon as all steps are done, the block disappears. It only comes back if a step opens up again, for example when you set your only venue to inactive.

Filling in your organisation is not on the checklist, but it is the best first step. That is why the rest of this article starts there.

Step 1 — Filling in your organisation

What you see: on the left in the menu is Settings → Organisation. You land on a screen with seven tabs at the top: The details, Languages, Look and feel, Wallet passes, Your shop, Invoices to buyers and Contact.

What you do: on the first tab fill in your name, your organisation code, your country, your currency and your time zone. On the Contact tab put your contact email address and your billing address. Click Save at the bottom.

The name goes on the ticket, in the confirmation email and on the invoice. So write it the way it is officially called, not the way you refer to it in the corridors.

The organisation code is one short word without spaces, for example hoevefeesten. That code is part of the address of your ticket shop and is the code your scanning staff later sign in with. Choose it well once and then leave it alone.

Deeper: Setting up your organisation explains every field separately, including what happens if you leave something empty.

Step 2 — Adding a venue

What is a venue? The place your visitor comes to: your parish hall, your museum, the jetty the boat leaves from. One organisation can have several.

What you see: Settings → Venues, with the New venue button at the top right.

What you do: fill in the name the way your visitor knows the place — that name goes on the ticket. Fill in the address. Below that, fill in the opening hours: for each weekday you add blocks with a start and an end time. A lunch break is simply two blocks on the same day. A closing day goes under Exceptions: a date without hours means closed.

Note: the opening hours are not decoration. They set the limits on which time slots you may create later. If you leave them empty, nothing sets a limit and the time slot generator creates slots at moments when you are closed.

Deeper: Organisation and venue explains when to take one venue and when to take two.

Step 3 — What you sell

What you see: Sales → Products, with New product at the top right.

What you do: create a product for each thing you sell. An admission ticket. A child's ticket. A seat at the table with the full menu. A guided tour. Give every product a name and a description.

Every product has at least one price attached to it, and that price is attached to a channel. Without a price for the online channel your product does not appear in your ticket shop — that is the most commonly made mistake of all.

Does what you offer have a fixed time — a guided tour at 2pm, a two-hour sauna session — then switch on time slots. A time slot is a moment with a maximum number of seats. If you sell ordinary day tickets, you do not need them.

Deeper: Products and prices and Time slots.

Step 4 — Connecting your payment provider

What is a payment provider? A company that handles your visitor's payment: Bancontact, card, or another method. Your visitor's money then arrives in your account. You use your own account with Mollie, Stripe or Bancontact Pro; we do not sit in between.

What you see: Settings → Payments.

What you do: choose your provider and follow the connection process. Afterwards make one test payment with your own card, and refund yourself. That costs you ten minutes and it is the only way to know for certain that it works.

Without a connected provider your ticket shop keeps working for free registrations. Only paid tickets cannot then be ordered.

Deeper: Which payment provider to choose, Connecting a payment provider and Making a test payment.

Step 5 — Inviting your staff

What you see: Settings → Staff, with Invite a staff member at the top.

What you do: fill in the email address and choose a role. Whoever scans at the door gets the role scanner — that role may only scan and see nothing else. Whoever also sells tickets at the desk gets the role desk.

The person invited receives an email with a link and chooses a password themselves. So you do not choose one for them.

Note: always invite at least one other person. An organisation only you can get into comes to a standstill the moment you fall ill or go on holiday.

Deeper: Staff and roles.

Step 6 — Putting your shop online and sharing your link

What you see: Settings → Organisation → Your shop, with two switches.

What you do: leave Online sales are on switched on — that is how it starts for a new organisation — and switch on Published when you want search engines to be allowed to find your shop. Only when Published is on does the Put your shop online step on your checklist get ticked. Below the form, in the Sharing your shop block, is the address of your shop, ready to copy.

That address has the form /{taal}/s/{jouw-code}. Put it on your website, on social media, or turn it into a QR code for a poster. If you want to build the shop into your own site or run it under your own domain, see Embedding your ticket shop.

And at the door?

Install the scanning app on one or more phones. Your scanning staff sign in with the organisation code and their own email address. That role may only scan: no revenue, no orders, no settings. See Scanning app and scanning staff.

A timeline: an association's dinner event

A dinner event is one evening, with a sale that runs for a few weeks.

When	What you do
Four weeks before	Steps 1 to 4: organisation, venue, products and prices, payment provider. Make your test payment now, not later.
Three weeks before	Put your shop online and share the link. Put the QR code on your poster and in your newsletter.
Two weeks before	Take a daily look at Orders. If you see no sales at all after a busy round of sharing, test the link yourself on your phone.
One week before	Invite your volunteers with the scanner role. Have them install the app and sign in once — not on the night itself.
The day before	Do a trial scan with a ticket of your own. Charge the phones. Make sure there is network coverage at the door.
The day itself	Scan at the door. Anyone arriving without a ticket you sell to at the desk.
The day after	Look at your revenue and your payout. See Payout and costs.

A timeline: a museum that sells all year round

A museum has no date that everything works towards. The set-up is the same, but the rhythm differs.

When	What you do
In the start-up week	Steps 1 to 6 in one go, and fill in your opening hours fully and correctly. For a museum those hours are your most important piece of data.
Before you open	Switch on time slots if you let visitors choose a time. Generate slots for the coming month, not for the whole year.
Every month	Generate next month's slots. If you run the generator over the same period again, only the missing slots are added.
At every closing day	Put the date under the Exceptions of your venue as soon as you know it. So in January already for the bridging day in May.
Every season	Look in Settings → Staff at the Last signed in column and remove anyone who has not been back for a year.

Commonly made mistakes

• A product without an online price. The product exists, but nobody sees it in your shop. Add a price with the online channel.
• Leaving the opening hours empty. The time slot generator then creates slots at moments when you are closed. Fill in the hours before you generate slots.
• Changing the organisation code after you have shared it. Every shared link and every printed QR code then stops working. Choose it once.
• Only discovering on the night itself that the scanning app still has to be installed. Have your volunteers sign in once a week beforehand.
• Not making a test payment. You then only notice a wrongly connected provider when a real visitor gives up, and that visitor does not come back.

What if …

What if I have no VAT number?

Then you leave the field empty. Many informal associations have none. You can sell perfectly well. See Setting up your organisation.

What if my event is already next week?

Then you do steps 1 to 4 today and steps 5 and 6 tomorrow. It can be done in a single day. Do not skip the test payment, not even in a hurry.

What if I have no payment provider yet and still want to start?

Set your products to free and use the shop as a registration form for now. As soon as your provider is connected, you put prices on them.

What if there is no internet at the door?

Test it on site before your event starts, and keep a second device with mobile coverage on hand. See Scanning app and scanning staff.

What if I have filled something in wrongly?

Almost everything can be changed afterwards. The two exceptions to watch out for: the organisation code (it breaks shared links) and lowering the capacity of a time slot below what has already been sold (not possible, and rightly so).

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to pay before I can try anything? You can work through the whole set-up and look at your shop before you sell anything. Exactly what your plan involves is in Your plan and pausing.

Where does my visitors' money end up? In your own account, via your own payment provider. See Payout and costs.

Can I still sell tickets at the door as well? Yes. The desk till sells with the same products and the same capacity, so you cannot fill a hall twice over. See The desk till.

Does my visitor have to print their ticket? No. The QR code on their phone is enough. If they do want to print it, the same QR code works just as well on paper.

I am the treasurer and do not know half the words. Where do I start? With the glossary. Every technical term in this manual is explained there in a single sentence.

Stuck?

Write to us. Every email reaches someone who helped build the system, and a question about your own situation is never too small.

Choosing your language

The back office comes in seven languages: Dutch, French, English, German, Italian, Bulgarian and Spanish. You can switch in two places:

• Top right, next to the circle with your initials, is a language list. Pick another language and the screen reloads in it straight away. If you are signed in, Passavo also saves that choice on your profile straight away. You can do that on the login screen too, before you sign in.
• On your profile (click the circle with your initials top right, then Profile) is the field Language. What you save there, Passavo remembers for next time, on every device.

This choice only concerns the back office. Your shop, tickets and e-mails follow your visitor's language, not yours.

Making the menu smaller

Top left, next to the logo, there is a button with an arrow pointing left. Click it and the menu folds into a narrow column of icons, without text. That leaves more room for your tables, for example at the desk or on a small laptop. Hover over an icon and its name appears. Click the button with the arrow pointing right at the top and the menu is back in full. Passavo remembers your choice in this browser. On a narrow screen, such as a phone, the menu sits behind the button with three lines.