Event check-in workflow, with Pay at Event option

[Allan]

Hi,

The good news is that we are finally getting some traction getting people to use the online ticketing for events. The bad news is that managing the ticketing system is like learning to fly an airplane.

We have an event coming up for which we activated the “pay at pickup” option, which has raised three issues:
1) How can we tell who as paid in advance via PayPal and who selected “pay at pickup?” (it appears that we should create two different tickets so that they are identified on the Event/Attendees screen)

2) What is the process for “reviewing” the purchases so that they can be checked in?

3) How do we manage check-in at the event? (Use “search” every time someone checks in?)

On the event’s Attendees screen, all orders, regardless if they were pay-at-pickup or were paid via PayPal, have Status of “Processing,” and the “check in” button is disabled. Looks like we have to mark the PayPal transactions Complete in Woo Commerce — is that correct?

In addition, the sort order on this page appears to be random, with no way to change it. This makes check-in process extraordinarily difficult.

The summary on the Event Attendees screen says that all tickets are “awaiting review” — where are we supposed to do this review? In Woo Commerce?
How are we supposed to collect payment and mark attendance in the system with no sort method?

Is there workflow documentation?

Color me confused.

[Andras]

Hi Allan,

Thanks for getting in touch with us!

Let me try to help you wash those colors off. 😉

1) How can we tell who as paid in advance via PayPal and who selected “pay at pickup?” (it appears that we should create two different tickets so that they are identified on the Event/Attendees screen)

This is definitely one solution, and probably the best. You will need to set it up in a way that if people choose the ‘regular’ ticket, then they don’t get the option of ‘pay at pickup’ at checkout, and vice versa, when they choose that ‘pay at pickup’ ticket, then they don’t see a payment option at checkout.

Other option would be having only one ticket and then adding the payment option to the attendee list export with a customization. Or even better, you can add an attendee meta field to the ticket simply asking for ‘Are you going to pay at pickup? => Yes / No’, which will be automatically added to the export.

2) What is the process for “reviewing” the purchases so that they can be checked in?

There are no set processes from our side. Purchases and statuses are handled by WooCommerce (in your case). By default you will need to review the purchases and set them completed manually.

Or you can try this snippet which will set the status of all purchases to completed automatically:

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/automatically-complete-orders/

3) How do we manage check-in at the event? (Use “search” every time someone checks in?)

Using search is one way.

You can print a list and search there.

Or you can use QR code check in. When a user purchases a ticket, then the ticket they receive via email contains a QR code. You can scan that with a QR code scanning app on a mobile phone and will check the user in.

For this you will need the following:

• make sure that the user’s order has been set to completed
• on the phone which you are using to check in, you have to be logged in to the admin dashboard as an admin (but at least editor I think)

Otherwise the QR check in will not work. I recommend you to test this before, to avoid any surprises.

In addition, the sort order on this page appears to be random

I believe the sorting is by purchase date / ticket number / order number. (These all should follow the same order.)

The summary on the Event Attendees screen says that all tickets are “awaiting review”

“awaiting review” signals that the WooCommerce order is in “processing” status, and not completed. Once you set the order to completed, then it will change here as well.

Note, currently we have a glitch where the change on the attendee list will take a couple minutes. Using this snippet in your functions.php file will fix that until we release a permanent fix.

add_filter( 'tribe_tickets_attendees_admin_expire', 'custom_tickets_attendees_expire' );
add_filter( 'tribe_tickets_attendees_expire', 'custom_tickets_attendees_expire' );
function custom_tickets_attendees_expire () {
// number of seconds
return 10;
}

How are we supposed to collect payment and mark attendance in the system with no sort method?

You will need to look up the WooCommerce order for the ticket and make changes to the order. However if it is already marked completed I’m not sure what else can be done.

If you can give me a detailed description of this scenario then I might be able to give you some ideas, but this is beyond our control.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

Cheers,
Andras

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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