Events

This article puts a one-off event online in a single go: a name, a date, and a few kinds of tickets each with their own price. There is a wizard for it, so that you forget nothing. Allow a quarter of an hour, and your dinner evening is in your shop.

What is an event?

An event is a one-off moment with its own name, its own date and its own number of seats: the dinner evening of Saturday 13 March, Friday night's quiz, the 8 p.m. try-out, the Christmas concert.

The difference from an ordinary product lies in the date. An event has one and ends after it: the day after, it is no longer in your shop. An ordinary product — a day ticket for your museum — keeps running until you set it to inactive yourself.

An event is not, incidentally, a different kind of thing from a product. It is a product with a date. You notice that when you open one to edit it: you get the same form as with a product, with the same list of prices underneath. The Events screen only groups them differently, so that you do not have to think about how it is put together under the bonnet.

Event or ordinary product?

If you are in doubt, use this table.

What you are selling	Choose	Why
Dinner evening on 13 March	Event	One date, ends afterwards
Friday night's quiz	Event	Likewise
Performance on three evenings	Three events	Every evening its own capacity
Day ticket for your museum, all year	Product	No end date
Guided tour every Saturday at 2 p.m.	Product with time slots	Repeats, with an hour
Course of six lessons, sold together	Series	One sale, several moments
Christmas market, three days of free entry	Product per day or one product	No fixed capacity per moment

Rule of thumb: if it repeats, it is a product. If it happens once, it is an event. If your visitor has to choose an hour, you need time slots in both cases; see Time slots.

What you need beforehand

• An account with the Owner or Administrator role.
• The name of your event, as it should appear in the shop.
• The date.
• One or more active venues filled in, if your event takes place somewhere specific.
• The kinds of tickets you are selling, with their price. If you do not know your VAT rate, first read Products and prices.
• A quarter of an hour.

If you come across a word you do not know, it is in the glossary.

Setting up an event

Step 1 — opening the wizard

1. In the menu on the left, click Sales and then Events.
2. You now see the list of your events, with their date, their seats and how many have been sold. If there is nothing there yet, you see the message that there are no events yet.
3. Click New event at the top right. A wizard with two steps opens. At the top you see those two steps: The event and Ticket types.

Step 2 — the event

Fill in:

Field	What you fill in
Name of the event	One field per language your shop shows. Your default language is required.
Date	Required. Click the field and a calendar folds open.
Venue	Leave empty if your event does not hang on one venue. Only active venues are in it.
Seats in total	Leave empty for unlimited. Read the warning below.
Description	Appears in your shop underneath the name. Three lines of text.
VAT set	The VAT rates that apply to this event. Passavo proposes the set of your venue's country; see VAT sets.

Note: Seats in total is put on each ticket type separately (in the Capacity block as Maximum per day), and you see it in the list in the Seats column. It is a hard limit: your ticket shop, your till and your resellers sell from the same pool and stop by themselves when it runs out. If you enter 100 for an event with an adult and a child ticket, that does mean: at most 100 adults and at most 100 children, not a shared pool of 100. If you want one limit across all tickets together, sell with a single ticket type.

Then click Next.

Step 3 — the ticket types

A ticket type is one kind of ticket: Adult, Child, Supporter ticket.

You see one block. Per ticket type you fill in three things:

• Name — Adult for instance. If you leave it empty, there is only one kind of ticket and it is simply named after your event.
• Price — in euros, so 25 or 12.50. A comma is allowed. Zero is allowed too: it is then a free registration.
• Own VAT rate — if you leave it empty, the ticket type gets the rate for admission from the VAT set of step 2 (you see that rate in grey in the field). If you fill in a percentage, such as 6 or 0, that rate applies to this one ticket type.

Click Add a ticket type for every next kind of ticket. A block is then added.

At the bottom sits the switch The same price at the desk too. It is switched on, and that is usually what you want as well: you then get an online price and a desk price with the same amount straight away. If you switch it off, you sell this event online only until you add a desk price yourself.

Click Create.

A complete example: the brass band's dinner evening

On Saturday 13 March 2027 the brass band is organising a spaghetti evening in the parish hall. Adults pay 18 euros, children 10 euros, and anyone who cannot come but does want to support buys a supporter ticket of 5 euros. There is room for a hundred and fifty people. The VAT on the meal is 6%; the supporter ticket is a donation and gets 0%.

Step 1. Sales → Events → New event.

Step 2 — the event.

• Name of the event: Brass band spaghetti evening
• Date: 13/03/2027
• Venue: Parish hall
• Seats in total: 150
• Description: Spaghetti with home-made sauce, served continuously from 5 to 9 p.m. Vegetarian on request.
• VAT set: leave what Passavo proposes.

Click Next.

Step 3 — the ticket types. You fill in three blocks. Because the meal and the supporter ticket each have their own rate, you fill in the VAT rate yourself here:

Name	Price	Own VAT rate
Adult	18	6
Child	10	6
Supporter ticket	5	0

You leave The same price at the desk too switched on: at the entrance you sell the same tickets at the same price.

Click Create.

What you see now. You come back to the list of events. There are three rows with the date 13/03/2027:

• Brass band spaghetti evening — Adult
• Brass band spaghetti evening — Child
• Brass band spaghetti evening — Supporter ticket

Every row has its own Sold column, which is at nought. That is not a fault: under the bonnet every ticket type is a product of its own, and we will come back to that shortly.

In your shop the event appears with its three tickets below one another, each with its own quantity picker:

A visitor chooses two adults and one child, pays, and gets their tickets by email. At the entrance you scan them. See The scan app.

Why every ticket type is a row of its own

This confuses almost everybody the first time, so here is the reason.

A child ticket has its own price, its own VAT rate and its own counter. Three things that move independently of one another. If you put them into one product, you can no longer say how many children are coming, and your VAT return does not add up when food is 6% and drink is 21%.

What that means for you, in practice:

• in the list of events you see them grouped together per date, with per row how many have been sold;
• you edit per ticket type: click the row, and you get the same form as with an ordinary product, with the prices underneath;
• you add a ticket type by creating a new product with the same date; it joins the rest by itself;
• you take one kind of ticket off sale by setting that one product to inactive. The rest stays.

The number under Sold comes from the order lines and not from the tickets: a group ticket of ten seats counts as ten. It counts orders that are paid, still awaiting payment or partially refunded. A cancelled, expired or fully refunded order no longer counts; a single cancelled ticket in a paid order does.

An event with sittings

You do not fill in the time of an event separately. That is not an oversight: at most dinner evenings service runs continuously and an hour has no meaning.

If you are organising two sittings — noon and 6 p.m., each with their own number of seats — you have two options.

Approach	When
Two events	The sittings really do stand apart: own capacity, own ticket price, perhaps even a different name
One event with time slots	It is the same sale, only with a different hour

For two events you simply go through the wizard twice, with the names Spaghetti evening — midday and Spaghetti evening — evening for instance.

For time slots you create the event as above and then go to Sales → Time slots. As soon as time slots are ready for a ticket type, your visitor has to choose one. If you work with several ticket types, run the generator for each of those ticket types: each has its own slots with its own seats. See Time slots.

A time slot is also the way to put a hard limit on your sales. The capacity of a time slot is enforced online and at the desk, and nobody can buy a full slot any more. If you want that for an event without sittings, create one time slot per ticket type on the day of your event: set From and Up to and including to that day, and First start and Last start to the same time.

Free registrations

Set the price to 0.

Your visitor then goes through the same order, fills in the same details, gets the same confirmation email and the same scannable ticket — but no payment is involved. They are not sent on to a payment page.

That is handy for:

• a members' meeting where you want to know how many chairs to put out;
• an open day with a limited number of seats;
• a free lecture for which you do want a list of participants;
• a waiting list, where you get in touch later.

In that case switch on Name on the ticket on the product: the order then asks for the name of every participant, and you have your list straight away. See Products and prices.

Note: free also means there is no threshold. Whoever pays nothing finds it easier not to turn up. For a free event with limited seats, do feel free to ask for a token euro, or send a reminder the day before.

Afterwards

An event that has passed disappears from your ticket shop by itself. You do not have to do anything for that: the day after the date it is no longer there.

In the back office it simply stays, with all its orders, tickets and scans. That is your list of participants from last year, and that is something you want to find again next year — to know how much spaghetti to cook, or to invite last year's people.

The list of events shows only what is still to come by default. At the top sits the filter Only what is still to come; switch that off and you also see last year's events.

What you can do after that: view every ticket sold in the Tickets menu, with the name, the product, the date and whether it has been scanned — so you see how many of the tickets you sold really came in. The orders themselves are under Orders (see Following up orders). And you can copy last year's event under Sales → Products, with the Copy button on each ticket type, and then adjust the date and the prices.

Common mistakes

Thinking that "Seats in total" stops sales. The number is set on every ticket type separately, and your shop and your till simply keep selling once it has been reached. Keep an eye on the Sold column, or work with one time slot per ticket type.

Creating three separate products instead of using the wizard. You may, but then you forget the third price. The wizard writes the event and all its ticket types away in one movement.

Forgetting the date. Without a date it is not an event but an ordinary product, and then it does not end by itself. The wizard requires the date; if you create the event as a product, the Date of the event field is easy to miss.

Editing last year's event instead of copying it. You then lose your list of participants: last year's orders suddenly point at an event from this year. Copy it and adjust the copy.

Switching "The same price at the desk too" off without adding a desk price. Your till at the entrance then refuses the ticket, because there is no price for the Desk channel. Add one on the ticket type.

What if …

What if my event is not in the shop?

Check in this order:

1. Is the Active tick switched on for the ticket type?
2. Is the date today or later? An event from yesterday disappears by itself.
3. Does the ticket type have a price for the Online channel that is valid today?

What if I have forgotten a ticket type?

Go to Sales → Products, create a new product of the Event type with the same name and the same date, and give it a price. Or quicker still: copy an existing ticket type from the same event, adjust the name and the price, and set it to active.

What if the event is not going ahead?

Set all the ticket types to inactive, so that nothing more is sold. The tickets sold stay in place — that is deliberate, because it is how you know who to notify. Refunding and cancelling the tickets is done in the orders; see Cancelling and refunding. If you would rather keep the money in the house, offer a gift voucher instead of a refund; always ask your visitor about that, because a refund in money is their right. See Gift vouchers.

What if I want more seats than I filled in?

Open the ticket type, fold open the Capacity block and adjust Maximum per day. If you work with time slots, you adjust the capacity of the slot with the Change capacity button under Sales → Time slots.

What if two people buy the last seat at the same time?

Then exactly one of them gets that place. With or without a time slot: the last place is checked and taken in one movement, and your webshop, your till and your resellers sell from the same pool. Whoever is too late gets the message that the event is sold out, or how many places are left.

In your shop, your visitors see how many places are still free, and Sold out as soon as it is full. At the till, the same appears on the tile. A place held during checkout comes back by itself after ten minutes if the buyer drops out.

Frequently asked questions

Can I create an event with one kind of ticket? Yes. Leave the name of the ticket type empty. Your visitor then simply sees the name of your event with one price underneath.

Can I still change the price of an event later? Yes, but do not overwrite the existing price. Put an end date on it and create a new row. See Products and prices.

Why are my three ticket types three rows in the list? Because under the bonnet they are three products, each with their own price, VAT and counter. They do sit together on the same date.

Do my orders disappear when the event has passed? No. Only from the shop. In the back office everything stays: orders, tickets and scans.

Can I get a list of participants with names? Yes, if you have switched on Name on the ticket on the product. The name of every participant is then asked for when ordering. That name sits with each ticket: in the Tickets table of the order and in the Tickets menu.