Events

What the Events area is for

Events is where every night you open the doors lives. The list at /events is reached from Events in the top navigation, and each row is one occasion in front of an audience, a concert, a matinee, a fundraiser gala. Fay calls them all events, whatever you call them on your own posters.

An event has no status to manage, there is no draft, published, or closed. It is simply active or archived, because Fay archives and never deletes. Nearly everything else on the page, how many tickets sold, how many walked up, who was actually in the room, is computed from the ticket orders and imports that hang off the event, not typed in by hand.

Seasons & the season filter

A season is not a page of its own in Fay. It is a filter on this one. With nothing chosen, the list shows the current season. A season dropdown offers All seasons plus each season by name, so you can step back into any past run. Open an older, archived season and the header gains an Archived badge while the description rewrites itself to the season’s name, a middot, and its date span, “Spring 2025 · Jan – May 2025,” for instance. The full story of why the season is the reporting spine lives in the Seasons article.

When a single season is selected, events are grouped under their program heading, the “Program / grouping” you set on each event, so a three-night run or a matinee-and-evening pair sits together. Switch to All seasons and the grouping falls away in favor of a flat, chronological list with an extra Season column.

The events list

In a single season the table carries these columns: the Event (its name, linking to the record), Date, Venue, Sold, and Walk-ups. The all-seasons view adds a Season column between Date and Venue.

Sold reads “{ticketed} of {capacity} ({pct})”, for example “120 of 200 (60%)”, whenever you have set a capacity; otherwise it shows the raw number sold on its own. Walk-ups is the anonymous walk-up count: heads at the door that no ticket accounts for (Fay explains how it derives this in the Audience & attendance article). The event with the most walk-ups in the season carries a Most badge, a nudge to import that one first, because it hides the most unknown faces.

The event record

Open an event and its record is organized into four tabs. The ?tab= in the URL remembers which one you were on, so a reload, or a link you paste to yourself, lands back on the same tab. An archived event wears an Archived badge beside its name, and an event somebody else staged wears a Produced by … badge naming them. Along the top sit its actions: Import tickets, Edit, and Archive (which becomes Restore once archived). A past event that closed with no attendees on file shows a callout, “Find out who was in the room, Import attendee list.”

Room

A description list, the honest tally of who was really there:

• Capacity: the room’s seats, or “·” if unset.
• Headcount (manual): the door count you enter yourself; “Not counted yet” until you do.
• Ticketed: tickets sold.
• Known attendees: the people Fay can put a name to.
• Anonymous walk-ups: shown in bold; the faces the headcount holds that no name accounts for. When it is positive and Fay can work out a rate, a 40% unidentified badge sits beside it.
• Identification rate: the share of the room you can name, as a percentage, or “·” when there is nothing to measure.
• First-timers vs returning: reads “{n} new · {m} returning.”
• Ticket revenue: what the night took at the box office.

Beneath the tally, when there are any, sits First-timers at this event, not a number but the actual names, each with a Log contact button beside it. A note within the week is the single most useful thing anybody does with that list.

Nothing about it is maintained by hand. Somebody is a first-timer because this is the only event they have attended, which quietly stops being true the moment they come back, which is exactly why there is no “first time?” box on the ticket form. A box would be right once and wrong forever after.

Tickets

Add ticket order sits above a table of every order: Purchased, Buyer (a link to the person, or “Anonymous”), Type (General, Senior, Student, Comp, or “Free / RSVP”), Qty, Amount, and Attended (“·,” “Yes,” or “No”). Each row offers Edit and Archive.

Imports

Every box-office file you have brought against this event, with Uploaded, Source, Status, Matched, Created, and a View to reopen it. Before your first upload it reads “No imports yet.” The status is a badge:

• pending: uploaded, not yet parsed.
• previewing: parsed and waiting for you to confirm the matches.
• committed: approved and written into people and attendance.
• failed: the file could not be read.

The whole guided pass is covered in the Ticket imports article.

Notes

The program notes you keep on the event, a place for the running order, the guest soloist, or a reminder that the hall’s piano needs tuning first.

Adding & editing an event

Add event and Edit open the same form: name, performed at (a date and time), venue (with a datalist of the venues you have already used, so the second concert at St. Mary’s Hall autocompletes), produced by (see below), program (“Program / grouping”), capacity, headcount (manual), comps (“Comps (manual)”), and program notes.

Concerts somebody else produced

Leave Produced by blank for your own events. Name the producer when you appeared in somebody else's concert and they sold the tickets, a partner orchestra, a festival, a church that booked you for its own series.

The night still belongs on your season page, and everyone who came still counts as an attendee, with all the audience history that brings. What changes is one number: the event is left out of the season's average fill. Fill rate is a claim about how well you sold a house, and you did not sell that one, the list the partner sends afterwards is whatever they choose to share, never the night's real sales, so counting it against their capacity would report every co-production as a half-empty room.

The list they do send goes in the same way any attendee list does, through ticket imports on the event itself.

Notice what is not here: you never type who came. Attendance arrives through ticket orders and imports, and the Room tab does the arithmetic. Archiving an event hides it from the season list while keeping every ticket, import, and note intact; Restore brings it straight back.