Organisation and venue

Two words come back constantly in this manual: organisation and venue. Understand those two and the rest falls into place by itself. Fail to understand them and in your first week you make a choice you regret a year later. This article explains them and helps you choose.

You need no settings for it. Read it once and you know what you are getting into.

What you need beforehand

• Ten minutes and no prior knowledge whatsoever.
• An idea of who you are: one association, or several.
• An idea of where your visitor comes to: one place, or several.
• If you want to fill it in straight away, you need the owner role for the organisation and the owner or administrator role for the venues. See Staff and roles.

If you come across a technical term you do not know, look in the glossary.

What is an organisation?

An organisation is the customer in the system. It is the thing your products, your orders, your tickets and your money hang on. Think of: the association, the club, the visitor attraction, the company.

Everything you create sits in exactly one organisation. A product of organisation A is not for sale in the shop of organisation B. An order of A does not appear in B's revenue figures. They do not see one another.

Three examples, from simple to less simple:

• An escape room as a sole trader. One organisation. The proprietor is the only owner, and all tickets, orders and invoices sit there.
• A non-profit with two branches. A local history society with a "museum" branch and a "walks" branch. One legal entity, one account, one set of books. So: one organisation. The two branches become two venues, or simply two groups of products.
• A municipality with three museums. If the three museums send the same invoices, use the same VAT number and their revenue lands in one pot, that is one organisation with three venues. If the three museums each want their own revenue figures, their own staff and their own ticket shop, they become three organisations.

When do you make two, and when one?

One question almost always brings you to the right answer: who sends the invoice and which account does the money land in? If that gives the same answer just once, it is one organisation.

Situation	How many organisations	Why
One non-profit, two halls in the same municipality	One	Same legal entity, same account. The halls become venues.
One non-profit, two branches each with their own activities	One	One set of books. Separate with venues or with products, not with organisations.
Two non-profits each with their own statutes	Two	Two legal entities, two VAT numbers, two invoices.
Municipality with three museums, one municipal treasury	One	One recipient of the money. Three venues.
Municipality with three museums that each settle separately	Three	Each museum keeps its own books.
A museum and its friends association	Two	They are two different legal entities.
One escape room, two rooms	One	One business. The rooms become products, not venues.
One festival, a new edition every year	One	The edition is an event within the same organisation.

Note: a second organisation is not a free extra. It has its own settings, its own payment provider, its own staff, its own ticket shop link and its own billing. Everything you set up, you set up twice. So only create a second one when the bookkeeping calls for it.

If you do belong to two organisations, you switch at the top of the menu, on the name of your organisation. With a single sign-in you can belong to several organisations.

What is a venue?

A venue is the physical place your visitor comes to. Your hall, your building, your grounds, the jetty the boat leaves from, the marquee on the square.

A venue has a name the way your visitor knows the place — that name goes on the ticket. It has an address. It has a time zone, which determines what "today" means for the time slots of that place. And it has opening hours.

Examples:

• A sports club with one clubhouse: one venue.
• A museum with a main building and a store you may visit twice a year: two venues, because your visitor has to go somewhere else.
• An association that holds its dinner event in the parish hall this year and in the school next year: two venues, or one venue you adjust. Either works; two is clearer if you keep old tickets.
• An amateur dramatics society playing in the same hall but on three evenings: one venue, three events.

You set a venue to inactive when you no longer sell there. It then disappears from the drop-down lists for products, devices and till layouts (where it was already chosen, it stays), but what has already been sold is left untouched.

Opening hours and time slots

This is the part that goes wrong most often, so read it slowly.

The opening hours of a venue are a list of blocks per weekday. For every day you add zero, one or several blocks with a start time and an end time. A day without blocks is closed.

• Open continuously from 10am to 5pm? One block: 10:00 – 17:00.
• Lunch break from noon to 1pm? Two blocks: 10:00 – 12:00 and 13:00 – 17:00. That is not an exception, it is simply two blocks.
• Closed on Mondays? No blocks under Monday.
• Closed on 11 November? That is an exception: a date that overrides the weekday. An exception without hours is closed, even if it falls on an ordinary Tuesday.

A time slot is a moment with a maximum number of seats: the 2pm guided tour, the sauna session from 10 to 12. When you have time slots created, the generator uses the opening hours of your venue as its limit. A closed Monday therefore produces no Monday slots.

Note: if your venue has no opening hours, nothing sets a limit. The generator then creates slots at every moment you specify, including 3 o'clock in the morning. This is why the list of venues has an Opening hours column with a tick: it shows you at a glance which venue is missing that limit.

If you only sell day tickets without a time, you do not need time slots. Fill in the opening hours anyway — they cost you five minutes and they save you the day you do start working with times. See Time slots.

How it all fits together

From top to bottom, each level hangs on the level above it:

Organisation  (the association, the club, the visitor attraction)
│  name, address, VAT number, organisation code, languages, house style
│  one ticket shop, one payment provider, one list of staff
│
├── Venue  (the place your visitor comes to)
│   │  name on the ticket, address, time zone, opening hours
│   │
│   ├── Time slot  (a moment with a maximum number of seats)
│   │       limited by the opening hours of this venue
│   │
│   └── Device  (the phone or till that stands here)
│
├── Product  (what you sell: ticket, seat at the table, guided tour)
│   │  hangs on one venue, or on all venues
│   │
│   └── Price  (per channel: online, desk, reseller)
│          without an online price the product is not in your shop
│
└── Order  (what a visitor buys)
    │
    └── Ticket  (one QR code, for one person, valid once)

Read it from the bottom up as well, because that is how you find the mistakes. A ticket belongs to an order, an order to products, a product to a venue (or to all venues), and everything to your organisation. If the online price is missing, your visitor does not see the product.

Deleting a venue or setting it to inactive

A venue where no till has ever been used can be deleted: open it under Settings → Venues and click Delete.

If a till has ever been used at the venue, that is not possible. Till sessions, Z reports and the till journal must be kept by law for years — in Germany under the KassenSichV, elsewhere under accounting law. Instead of Delete you then see Set to inactive. An inactive venue disappears from the selection lists; its till sessions, Z reports and orders are kept.

If you delete several venues at once in the list, Passavo skips the venues with till sessions and tells you why.

Commonly made mistakes

• Creating a second organisation when you needed a second venue. This is the most expensive mistake on this page. You then split your revenue, you have to connect a payment provider twice, your staff sit in two places and you share two links instead of one. First ask yourself whether two invoices really go out.
• Leaving the opening hours empty. Your time slot generator then has no limit. Fill them in before you create slots, not afterwards.
• Trying to enter the lunch break as an exception. A break is two blocks on the weekday. Exceptions are for dates.
• Deleting a venue after the season. Set it to inactive. Deleting also throws away all time slots of that venue, and its products lose their venue — and with it the address on the ticket.
• Naming the venue the way it is called internally. "Hall B" will shortly be on your visitor's ticket. Write down what they have to look for in the street.

What if …

What if I already have two organisations and it should have been one?

Then you cannot simply move what has already been sold. Choose the organisation you carry on in, create the missing venues and products there, and put the other organisation to rest by switching off its shop. Ask us for help before you delete anything.

What if my event takes place somewhere different every year?

Then create a venue per place and leave the old one on inactive. That way last year's ticket keeps the right address on it.

What if I have no fixed venue?

Then create one with the name of your association and the address of your registered office. A product without a venue is possible, but then there is no place and no address on the ticket. Besides, the checklist on your dashboard asks for one active venue, and time slots always hang on a venue.

What if two venues share the same capacity?

That is not possible. Capacity hangs on a time slot, and a time slot hangs on one venue. If you share one hall between two activities, make it one venue and separate with products.

What if I need a second organisation?

Ask us. A second organisation gets its own settings and its own subscription line; we set that up together with you, so that you do not accidentally pay twice for the same thing.

Frequently asked questions

Can I reach two organisations with one sign-in? Yes. One account can belong to several organisations, with its own role per organisation. You switch at the top of the panel.

Do two organisations each have their own ticket shop link? Yes, and that is precisely why you should not lightly create two. Every organisation has its own organisation code and therefore its own address. See Setting up your organisation.

Does every venue have to have its own address? Not compulsory, but sensible. The venue's address is on the ticket, in the ticket email and on the wallet pass, and your visitor uses it to find you.

Can a product belong to several venues? To one venue, or to all of them: if you leave the product's Venue field empty, it applies at every venue — but then there is no address on the ticket. If you want the address on the ticket, or a different price per place, create two products with the same name and each with its own venue.

Why is "venue" under Settings and not under Sales? Because a venue belongs to the set-up of your organisation and not to your daily selling. You create it once and rarely look at it again afterwards.