Setting up your organisation

Everything you create hangs on your organisation. That is the customer in the system: one association, one club, one visitor attraction. This article goes through every field on that screen and says each time what it does, where you see it again and what happens if you leave it empty.

If you work with several legal entities, you create several organisations and switch between them at the top. If you are in doubt whether that is necessary, first read Organisation and venue.

What you need beforehand

• The owner role. An administrator deliberately does not get in here: anyone who can change the organisation code can put the scanning app of an entire organisation out of action.
• The official name of your organisation, as it appears in the statutes.
• Your address: street and number, postcode, town.
• Your VAT number, if you have one.
• An email address that visitors' questions may be sent to.
• Twenty minutes.

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

You find the screen under Settings → Organisation. At the top are seven tabs: The details, Languages, Look and feel, Wallet passes, Your shop, Invoices to buyers and Contact. At the bottom is a single Save button, which saves all tabs at once. Below the form are two more blocks that stay visible on every tab: Sharing your shop and Own domain.

Tab 1 — The details

Field	What it does	If you leave it empty
Name of the organisation	Appears on the ticket, in the confirmation email and on the invoice	Required; you cannot save
Organisation code	Is part of your back office address and of your shop address, and is the code scanning staff sign in with	Required
Country	Determines which VAT set we suggest, and the VAT on the invoices you receive from us	Required
VAT number	Appears on your visitor's invoice	May be empty; associations often have none
VAT set	The VAT rates that apply wherever you choose nothing else at a venue or product	No set is chosen yet; check it with your accountant
Currency	The currency you sell in	Required
Time zone	Determines what "today" means in your overviews	Required

The name

Write it the way it is officially called, not the way you refer to it in the corridors. So "Heemkundige Kring Sint-Martinus vzw" and not "the society". That name appears on documents an accountant, a grant file or an auditor will later look at.

You can change it afterwards. Tickets already sent keep the name that was on them at the time — that is an email sitting with your visitor, not something we can still change.

The country

The country of your organisation, not of your visitor. It determines which VAT set we suggest for your products and events, and which VAT appears on the invoices you receive from us.

The VAT set

A VAT set is the list of VAT rates of a country. The set you choose here applies everywhere you set nothing else at a venue or a product. We suggest the set of your country; it remains a suggestion, so check it once with your accountant. See VAT sets.

The currency

The currency you sell in. If you change it later, nothing changes about what has already been sold: old orders keep the amount and the currency of the time. What you sell today goes in the new currency.

The time zone

A time zone says what time it is where you are. That sounds superfluous — surely it is simply the time? — but a computer has to know it explicitly, because it sits in a server room that could just as well be in another country.

The time zone determines what "today" means. If you sell a ticket at 11.40pm, it depends on your time zone whether that lands in today's or tomorrow's revenue. For a Belgian organisation you choose Europe/Brussels.

Note: a venue has a time zone as well, and that one determines what "today" means for the time slots of that place. Usually they are the same. If you have a venue in another country, the difference is useful.

What is a VAT number, and what if I do not have one?

A VAT number is the number the tax authorities know you by as a business that charges and remits VAT. In Belgium it looks like BE 0123.456.789.

The company number (in Belgium also called the KBO number, after the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises) is the identification number every business and every non-profit receives when it is founded. It consists of ten digits. If you are VAT-registered, your VAT number is literally the same number with BE in front of it.

Three situations:

• You are VAT-registered. Fill in your VAT number. It appears on the invoice your visitor receives, and that is exactly what they need in order to enter it in their own books.
• You are a non-profit or informal association without VAT liability. Leave the field empty. You can sell, send tickets and receive money perfectly well. No VAT number appears on your documents, because you have none.
• You do not know. Ask your accountant, or look at an invoice you once sent yourself. Better to fill in nothing than something wrong: a wrong VAT number on an invoice is more troublesome than a missing one.

Note: this field does not determine whether you charge VAT on your tickets. That hangs on your products and their rate. See Products and prices.

The organisation code

The code (also called the slug, the short name in a web address) is one short word without spaces, in lower case, for example hoevefeesten. Letters, digits and hyphens are allowed; spaces, full stops and punctuation are not. It is at most 60 characters long, and a code that already belongs to another organisation cannot be chosen: you then get an error message at the field.

It comes back in three places:

1. in the address of your back office, where you work yourself;
2. in the address of your public ticket shop, /{taal}/s/{code};
3. as the organisation code scanning staff sign in with in the app.

So choose it with care. Three rules of thumb: short enough to spell out over the phone, recognisable enough that your visitor recognises it in the link, and neutral enough that it still fits in five years' time. eetfestijn2026 is a bad code. sintmartinus is a good one.

Note: if you change the code after you have shared it, every shared link, every printed QR code and every device set up with the old code breaks. The system warns you about this and reports the new code after saving, but it cannot rescue the old links. Your scanning staff sign in with the new code from then on. Tickets already sold remain valid. Choose it once and leave it alone.

Tab 2 — Languages

Here you choose which languages your ticket shop shows, and which of them is your default language. A visitor gets the default language when we do not know their own language, and it is used on documents for which no choice has been made.

You do not have to switch on all seven languages. Two well-translated languages are better than seven half-filled ones. See Languages.

Tab 3 — Look and feel

Field	What it does	If you leave it empty
Your colour	The colour of the buttons in your shop	The shop uses the platform's colour — so not a black-and-white page
Logo	Appears at the top of your shop and on the invoices to your buyers; if your wallet pass has no logo of its own, this one goes on it	Your shop shows your name as text
Introduction text	Appears above your products, one field per language	Your shop starts straight away with your products
Link to your terms	The terms of your own organisation; your visitor sees them at checkout	There is no link to your own terms at checkout

You choose your colour with a colour picker. Take the colour of your logo or of your association. One colour is enough; there is no second colour to match it with.

You upload your logo as an image, up to 2 MB. A square or landscape logo with a transparent or white background works best. It appears at the top of your shop and on the invoices to your buyers, and on your wallet pass if that has no logo of its own.

The intro text is the place for practical sentences that are not a product: "You can park on the church square" or "Children under 6 get in free, you do not need to order a ticket for them". There is one field per language you have switched on.

The link to your terms points to a page on your own website or to a document. If you do not have terms yet, see Privacy and terms.

Tab 4 — Wallet passes

This is where you set how your tickets, season passes and gift vouchers look in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet: colours, logo, texts and the buttons under the pass. If you leave everything empty, the pass follows your look and feel. See Wallet passes.

Tab 5 — Putting your shop online

Two switches, and they do not do the same thing. This is the most confusing spot on the whole screen, so here it is explained slowly.

• Online sales are on. This is the main tap. For a new organisation it is on. If you switch it off, your shop can no longer be reached: anyone who opens your link gets the message that the page does not exist. The link under Sharing your shop and your own domain then stop working too. Switch it off when your sale is over or is not allowed to start yet.
• Published. This is about search engines. On puts your shop in the sitemap — that is the little list search engines use to know which pages your site has. Off, your link simply keeps working for everyone who knows it; it is just not actively offered to Google. For a new organisation it is off. Only when it is on does the Put your shop online step on your dashboard checklist get ticked.

So: if you want to start quietly and give the link only to your members, switch online sales on and published off. If you want to be found, switch both on.

Below the form, in the Sharing your shop block, is the address of your shop, ready to copy and share, with the Open the shop button.

Tab 6 — Invoices to buyers

Some visitors ask for an invoice: a company, a school, a self-employed person. If you switch on Invoices to buyers are on, we draw up that invoice in your name, with your details. Everything you set here is described in Invoices to buyers.

Tab 7 — Contact

Field	What it does	If you leave it empty
Contact email	Where visitors' questions go; appears as the reply address on your ticket emails	Your visitor cannot reply to their ticket email with a question
Telephone	Your telephone number for visitors	No number is shown
Name on the invoice	The name on the invoices you receive from us for your subscription	The name of your organisation is used
Billing address (email)	Where those invoices are sent	They go to your contact email
Street and number, Address line 2, Postcode, Town	The address on those invoices	Your invoice is missing an address

So the fields under Billing are about the invoices you receive from us, not about the invoices you give to your buyers — you set those up on the Invoices to buyers tab.

Pay attention to the contact email: that is the address a visitor uses when they cannot find their ticket again or have a question. Put an address there that somebody really does read, and preferably not the private address of one committee member who may have stepped down next year.

Your own domain

If you want your shop at an address of your own — tickets.yourdomain.be instead of the platform address — you register that domain in the Own domain block below the form: fill it in and click Add domain. You receive a TXT record to put with your dns provider, and then you click Check.

The full explanation, including what dns is and exactly where you put that record, is in Your own domain.

VAT in basis points

You will sometimes see a VAT rate shown as 2100 instead of 21%, for example in a staff member's activity log. That is not a fault: rates are kept internally in basis points, so that 6%, 21% and one day 6.5% all stay exact. In the forms you simply fill in the percentage.

Why it is like that: a computer works with decimal numbers roughly the way you do with 1/3 in decimals — you have to round somewhere. With money you do not want that. By using whole numbers (21% becomes 2100) the rounding disappears, and your VAT total is still right to the cent after a thousand tickets.

Commonly made mistakes

• Changing the organisation code after you have shared it. Every shared link, every printed QR code and every configured scanning device breaks. Choose it once.
• Filling in the informal name. "The society" on an invoice helps no accountant at all. Take the name from your statutes.
• Inventing a VAT number or filling in that of a committee member. Better to leave the field empty.
• Leaving the contact email empty. Your visitor then has no address to reply to, and their question reaches you by a detour or not at all.
• Thinking that published being off means your shop is closed. That is the other switch. Published is only about search engines.
• Forgetting to save after switching tabs. The seven tabs share one Save button at the bottom. Switch freely, but click it before you leave.

What if …

What if I have no VAT number?

Leave the field empty and simply sell. Many associations work this way. If in doubt, ask your accountant whether you are VAT-registered; that is not a question this screen can answer for you.

What if I do have to change the organisation code?

Then it is possible, but plan it. Change it at a moment when no sale is running, then share the new link again on every channel where the old one stood, and have your scanning staff sign in again with the new code. Printed QR codes pointing to the old link cannot be rescued.

What if my logo looks blurred or cut off?

Upload a larger version — a width of about 600 pixels is more than enough — and preferably use a PNG with a transparent background. A logo with a lot of white space around it looks smaller in the shop than it is; crop that white space away before you upload it.

What if I want to close my shop temporarily?

Switch Online sales are on off. Anyone who then opens your link gets the message that the page does not exist; so put a line on your website or your social media if needed. Everything stays as it is; you switch it back on later without setting anything up again.

What if I cannot see this screen?

Then you do not have the owner role. Ask the owner of your organisation to change your role, or to make the change themselves. See Staff and roles.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still change the name of my organisation later? Yes. New tickets and invoices get the new name; what has already been sent stays as it was.

My organisation has two names — an official one and one everybody uses. Which do I fill in? The official one, because that belongs on the invoice. The familiar name you put in your intro text or in your logo.

Where do I find the address of my ticket shop? Below the form, in the Sharing your shop block, ready to copy. It has the form /{taal}/s/{code}.

Why may an administrator not touch this? Because this screen contains the organisation code. Anyone who can change it can put the scanning app of an entire organisation out of action. That is why it is reserved for the owner.

Does anything change about my running sale if I adjust something here? Only what makes sense: a new name or colour appears in your shop immediately. Amounts and currencies of existing orders stay as they were.