If Fred booked for 3 people, provided names for just 1, how do I know that?

[artfulrobot.com]

We've used the allow booking of multiple people.

Fred has booked for three people, and as part of the booking process, Fred provided Wilma as the name of one of the others. So Fred has one place as yet unaccounted for.

I note on the participant lists that Fred and Wilma both appear, which is useful, but when Fred turns up with Barney, how do I know that Barney's all paid for? Fred's print out might say "std ticket: 3", but it does not show that Wilma accounts for one of those. So going on that alone, Fred could turn up with Barney and Betty and waltz in without the registration person knowing that one of Fred's three tickets was a separate name on the list.

I'm looking for a report that will give me a list like:

Code: [Select]

Name        tickets
Fred        std ticket:3   Booking included: Fred, Wilma
Wilma                      Booked by Fred.

Is that poss? Is there another way? Many thanks,

Rich

PS. Hope CiviCON London was good!

[artfulrobot.com]

OK, here's the answer, which in part is "wrong question"!

First of all, my client had set up the event incorrectly, and had included a priceset saying "how many tickets do you want to buy" - this is obviously different to CiviCRM knowing anything about numbers of tickets.

Second, I discovered that the booking process that starts with "how many people do you want to buy for" allows you to put in, say 10, but this number is not stored anywhere and if you choose Skip Participant, then basically you only pay for the names you register. I had been under the misconception that someone could book for more people than they have provided names for.

So after a lot of spreadsheet work it turns out that where Civi' thinks we've got 550 tickets sold, we've actually sold 680 (venue capacity 700 - phew!).

Lessons learnt for next time!

[Michael McAndrew]

Glad it worked out OK and thanks for sharing / updating your post so others can see the solution.

[Michael McAndrew]

PS - CiviCon London was great - hope you can make it next year - and so the sprint as well??

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

You may want to try the custom search from the extension at: https://civicrm.org/extensions/fancy-searches 

How did you end up with more participants than you realized you had?   If the event is configured to ask "How many tickets/seats do you need?" using a priceset, then you can figure out how many tickets were sold. (In this configuration, you do NOT have names for each ticket, you only have the name for the person who paid)

If you use the event config option "allow multiple participants" then you will get a participant record for each person, which is nice because  you have a name for each participant.

If you do both options (eg ask how many tickets via priceset AND allow multiple participants) the people filling out the form will likely get confused and reporting is messy.     Just curious - how do you expect to know if the visitor choose to "skip participant"? if they are skipped, no participant record is created. (nor does that fee get added in to the total)

[artfulrobot.com]

@epg - yeah, we ended up with the messy way, but just because the user who set it up didn't really know what they were doing. It's my job to sort them out next time ;-)

As for the skip participant - typically booking systems allow you to book +1s, which will not (initially) have names. With CiviCRM it's all or nothing, as you point out. At this event it was not likely that a group would arrive together with the person who booked, so we needed as many names as poss, then just to tell the rest (+1s) that they must turn up with the booker. But I don't think this is a useful thread to continue because it's based on such a mess of confusion to begin with! I've learnt and will train client in proper possibilities going forward.

Thanks for reply though.