Please note, this guide only applies to websites that have our events AND bookings modules installed.
If you haven’t got either of these installed on your website, please contact us, and we can send you a quote for setting up this system.
Before reading this guide, we recommend seeing our article on how to add events.
How to enable bookings for your events:
- Go to “Events” and “Add Event”.
- Add your event details, e.g. the title, description, location, date and times.
- Tick the “Enable registration for this event” box.
- A sample ticket is automatically created, which is called “Standard Ticket”, with its price set to “Free”, and with ten spaces.
- Edit this sample ticket by clicking on “Edit”.
- Change the details as appropriate to your event, so we suggest changing the “Name”, “Description”, “Price” (in GBP) and number of “Spaces”.
- Advanced selling options are available, for instance you can limit the number of tickets purchased in each transaction (“At most x spaces per booking“), or set early-bird tickets (“Available from/until“), or if you have a members’ only area on your website, you can make tickets available to logged-in users only. In most cases, you will not need to touch these options.
- Click “Close Ticket Editor”.
- If you have more than one ticket type to sell (e.g. different bands of tickets), repeat the process by clicking on the “Add new ticket” link.
- Some overall options are available at the bottom of the screen, e.g. a cut-off date for ticket purchases:
- When you have finished setting up your tickets, you can “Publish” your event.
Please note that booking forms will not work in “Preview” mode, so you need to publish your event before the booking form will display. Also, you may not see all the entry boxes (such as name, email address) if you’re logged-in as a website editor, because the system already recognises who you are. To properly preview the booking facility, as a visitor would see it, you may need to open up a private viewing / incognito window in your web browser, or log-out of the website editor.
Websites with multiple types of booking forms:
On some websites, we may have setup a number of different types of booking form, which you can apply to different types of events (i.e. asking for the name of each attendee, or asking for dietary info where meals are going to be provided, etc).
You can select the relevant booking form using the drop-down menus shown below. The “Booking Form” will take the details of the person making the booking, whilst the “Attendee Form” will take the details of each individual attendee (e.g. if five spaces are booked, the attendee form will ask for the details of each of those five attendees).
If you are unsure which booking form to use, just leave this as the default booking form.
Once you publish an event and have received a booking, we do not advise changing the type of booking form.
On the visitor’s page, the form may look like this example below:
View your event bookings:
In your website editor / WordPress software, go to “Events” / “Bookings”. Here you will see a list of bookings made via your website.
Scroll down and under the heading – “Events With Bookings Enabled” – you’ll be able to list bookings for each individual event, rather than all events grouped together. Simply click on the event title.
There is a “CSV” button, which allows you to download bookings to your computer in a spreadsheet format (as indicated below). Use the drop-down menus to filter which bookings you want exported:
Viewing orders with multiple attendees:
If your booking form allows people to request multiple tickets, your website may be setup to ask for the name of each attendee, for example:
To view the details of each individual attendee within multiple ticket orders:
- Use the drop-down menus to filter your bookings (e.g. “Future events” and “All”) and click the “Filter” button (shown in red below).
- Click the “Edit/View” link (shown in green).
You’ll then see the attendee information by scrolling down this screen:
You can also download the attendee details into a spreadsheet:
- Use the drop-down menus and click the “Filter” button (shown in red below).
- Once the bookings you want to export are displayed on the screen, you can then click the “CSV” file (shown in blue below):
- On the popup screen, click “Split bookings by attendee” (shown in red below).
- Then drag all the boxes you want included in your CSV file from the right-hand side (shown in green below) to the left-hand side (shown in blue). The boxes will turn yellow. If your events have multiple ticket types available, you may also want to include “Ticket Name”, “Ticket Price”, etc, within your exported file. Please note that boxes may be labelled twice, because the system may record two sets of data (one for logged-in website visitors, and one for logged-out / guest visitors), so ensure you drag over all the boxes you need:
- Then click the “Export Bookings” button.
- A spreadsheet file will then be downloaded to your computer in CSV format.
Delete old events bookings:
Once events have taken place, your website continues to store the attendee information, so you can refer back to who came along to your events.
However, if you want to delete this data (e.g. for data protection purposes):
- Go into the “Events” / “Bookings” screen.
- Select “Past events” from the drop-down menu and click “Filter”. This will display your archived events:
- Click “Delete” next to those bookings you want to remove.
Choosing the total number of spaces available:
You can choose the number of “Total Spaces” available for your event:
If you have an approval process in place, event spaces only become unavailable once they are confirmed bookings. Users can continue to request bookings if the number of confirmed bookings hasn’t reached the limit. This means the system will continue to take pending bookings, so for example you can choose to reject bookings if somebody hasn’t paid, or they don’t meet your attendance criteria, etc.
If needed, we can change this default behaviour, so pending bookings also count towards this limit.
If your website does not have a payment facility:
If you add a price to your event tickets, this is purely for information to your visitors, but no payments will actually be taken from visitors. You can arrange with your customers to take a payment offline.
To take payments online, we will need to setup a payment gateway (e.g. PayPal). Please contact us if you would like to take payments via your website.
If your website does have a payment facility:
As long as we have your PayPal details and we’ve confirmed PayPal is setup on your website, your visitors will now see a PayPal logo on your events booking form:
Once visitors have filled out their details, they will be taken to PayPal to complete payment.
When users reach the PayPal website, they can either login to an existing PayPal account, or use guest checkout (which allows users to enter their debit/credit card details immediately, without requiring a PayPal account).
If a ticket is set to free (£0), no PayPal logo will display and visitors will not be sent to PayPal.
Viewing transactions:
PayPal will email a copy of each transaction to the address saved in your PayPal account profile.
The status of each transaction is also recorded on your website. Go to “Events” and the “Bookings” screen. You can see recent PayPal transactions at the bottom of the screen.
In some cases, a user may not proceed with making a payment on PayPal. To list all your bookings, including failed payments, use the drop-down menu (as shown below) and choose “All” bookings, then click on the “Filter” button:
Adding VAT to events transactions:
If tax needs adding to your transactions, please let us know and we will set this up.
The VAT details will be shown to the user within PayPal:
You will also receive a copy of the VAT details in your confirmation email:
Want to offer online and offline payments?
If you want to offer both online payment (e.g. via PayPal) and offline payment (e.g. an option that says “I want to be invoiced”), we can add two different options to your booking form. Please tell us if you’d like your events system setup this way:
If you have any questions about using our events management software, please send us a message and we’ll be happy to help.