Beacon makes it easy to collect event registrations and sell tickets online. There's no code to write, plus we take care of a lot of the things you probably don't want to worry about, like:

We connect with industry-leading payment processors so you can securely process payments online.

To make it possible for Beacon to accept payments for tickets, go to Settings > Payments in your sidebar (you'll need to be an admin), and connect with Stripe.

The following sections take a closer look at how to set up your event registration form.

A ticket option describes a specific type of ticket that can be bought. You might have a ticket option for individual adults, one for children, and one for families. Ticket options allow you to specify the important details about each ticket, like how much they cost and how many people can attend with a single ticket.

Your ticket options are displayed at the top of your membership form and they are configured in the Ticket options section of your form configuration.
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Each ticket option corresponds to a single ticket type. You can only have one option for each ticket type. Typical types could be 'Adult', 'Child', and 'Family' tickets.

These fields allow you to describe your ticket option. They appear on your ticket form alongside the price of the ticket.

This is the cost for one of these tickets. Set this to 0 if you would like your ticket to appear as 'free'.

This corresponds to the number of people who can attend with this ticket. Usually, this is just 1, but you can choose a larger number if this ticket can be for multiple people. For example, if you're selling a table for 8 at a gala you would set this to 8, or perhaps 5 for a family ticket for 2 adults and 3 children. This corresponds to the number of event attendee records that will be created in Beacon.

This restricts the number of tickets of a particular type that can be bought in a single transaction. For example, you can restrict it to only allow 1 VIP ticket per transaction. Leave this field empty if you don't want to have restrictions on the number of tickets allowed to be purchased during a transaction.

This sets the maximum number of tickets of a particular type that are available for the entire Event. For example, you can restrict it to only allow 20 VIP tickets. Leave this field empty if you don't want to have restrictions on the number of tickets available for that ticket type.

Each form can have unique discount codes that allow registrants to reduce the cost of their whole order, either by a percentage, or a fixed amount.

To add a discount code to your form:

Time slots allow you to set several time slots for one event. For example, you may have a morning and an afternoon session for the same webinar, or you may want to stagger the people coming to your new exhibition opening to keep traffic consistent.

Time slots are optional and you don't have to divide your event into time slots. You can create as many time slots as you want in the Ticket time slots section of your form configuration.

You can set an allocation for each time slot. This limits the number of people who can attend this time slot.

The time slot is stored on the ticket record that is created when someone buys a ticket.

You'll be able to set limits on how many tickets can be purchased by slot (morning/evening) and will see the form react accordingly if a slot has been filled.

The Ticketholder details section in your form configuration allows you to collect information about your attendees. The section provides a list that corresponds to your ticket options and allows you to choose the fields that you would like to collect for each of these options.

You can add any fields that appear on either Person or Event attendee records. These fields will appear on your form and can be filled in.

For example, you can include a dropdown for collecting dietary preferences for each of your attendees, or add an option for them to provide their t-shirt size for a challenge event.

For multi-person ticket options, the form will show a space for details to be entered for every attendee. Understandably, the person buying the ticket might not have all of these details to hand - so you can make these details optional.

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There are four places where you can set the number of available tickets:

When someone registers to attend your event, you can take this opportunity to ask them for an additional donation. This works in the same way as a donation form.

You can choose whether to allow people to give additional donations in the Additional donation section of the form.

You can configure the donation amounts and frequencies in this section just as you would with a donation form.

Donations are created as entirely separate payments and charges in Beacon. This makes it easier to track where payments are coming from and to claim Gift Aid on them where you might not be able to for your ticket sale.

You can add a section to your event registration form which invites the event attendee to increase their payment to cover the costs of processing.

You can choose a percentage to reflect how much this ticket will cost to process. You can also decide whether this box will be checked by default.

This additional amount is added to both the ticket payment and any additional donations, increasing the value in the 'Amount' field. Gift Aid will be claimed on this total amount if eligible, and processing fees are charged on the total amount.

When an additional donation is made when buying a ticket, both payments will be increased by the desired percentage. The percentage amount added to each payment will be stored in the respective 'Covered fees' section.

When someone registers via a Beacon form, Beacon immediately sends an acknowledgement email to them.

You can customise the subject and content of this email, as well as the team member who the email is from in the acknowledgement area of the form settings. A special field called {{{tickets_summary}}} provides a convenient summary of all of the tickets that have been purchased that can be included in this email.

It can be useful to know when someone has made a new registration through one of your forms.

In the 'Notifications' section, you can customise who receives email notifications from Beacon each time a registration is made, as well as the subject and content of the email.

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When event registration forms are submitted, we automatically create the relevant records in your Beacon database. There's no manual entry.

The fixed data section allows you to set extra fields which will always have the same values. They are not added by your event attendees, they are added automatically by Beacon.

When new records are created via a Beacon form, Beacon sets the fixed data on each record created (as well as the data that comes from the form).

You can customise the fixed data that Beacon sets to fit your needs.

For more details on customising forms, see our main forms guide.

The person purchasing a ticket may be different to the person attending your event - a parent might purchase a camp place for a child, or a colleague may buy tickets for their coworkers. Beacon captures both the purchaser and the attendees, but don't worry - we'll deduplicate them if they're the same!

Registrants can easily re-use details they've entered already by clicking the button next to questions on the form (works for name, email, phone, and address).

No. This isn't something that is currently supported.

The event limit on your form will be checked against the number of Event attendee records connected to Tickets for that event.

The time slot limits on your form will be checked against the number of Event attendee records connected to Tickets for that event, that have each exact time slot.

For example, you could add staff or volunteers as event attendees for that event and they won't affect the overall capacity as they're not connected to Tickets. You can also amend or archive existing Event attendee or Ticket records in Beacon and your forms will correctly calculate the changes you've made.

Follow our guide here for how to manage cancellations.

Yes! You can link to your terms and conditions in the 'description' field of any section of your form.

You can also include a submission agreement if you'd like submitters to acknowledge them:

No. You can collect different details for different ticket options but the details collected are the same for all attendees of a particular ticket type. Consider making your ticket holder details optional so they can be skipped.