Watch your event sell, live
Read the sales dashboard for your own event and understand reserved versus sold.
Owned by Host / Promoter · 7 steps · about 12 minutes
Why this exists
This is the one staff-grade surface a scoped host gets in full, and it exists because a promoter who cannot see their own sales cannot promote. The sales endpoint is explicitly opened to admins, venue managers and the host scoped to that event — and to nobody else, for no other event.
What it will not show you is customer identity. You get counts and money; you do not get who bought what. The list of live holds, with buyer emails, is staff only. A host grant is a grant over an event, not over its audience.
The number people misread is reserved. Adding tickets to a cart reserves nothing at all. Inventory is only taken when a reservation is created at checkout, and that reservation has a short time-to-live (the event's hold TTL, between 5 and 10 minutes, default 10). During that window the tier's reserved count is up and its available count is down, and if the buyer wanders off the hold expires and the inventory comes straight back. So reserved is "someone is at the till", not "sold". Gross revenue on this dashboard counts only committed reservations — money that was actually paid.
This is also why an event can flip to sold out and then quietly un-sell-out twenty minutes later: sold out counts holds, and expiring holds reverse it.
Before you start
- A host grant on an event that is on sale.
- Ideally at least one live hold and one paid order to look at (the seed ships both on demo-event-0001).
Practise with
| Persona | Password | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| host_promoter | host@club.test | host123 | scoped host on demo-event-0001: partly sold, one active hold |
| venue_manager | manager@club.test | manager123 | can see who is holding inventory right now |
| admin | admin@club.test | admin123 | sees the orders and the money behind the same counts |
Steps 1–4 — Host / Promoter
their manual →-
1Open your event dashboard and find the Live Sales panel.Expected result Gross revenue and per-tier sold, reserved, available and percentage sold. The panel refreshes itself every 10 seconds.Watch out for Leave it open on a laptop during the on-sale. It is the fastest honest read you have.
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2Pull the same dashboard as JSON when you want the raw numbers for your own spreadsheet.Expected result Per-tier sold, reserved, available, percentage and gross in cents, plus the active hold count, the recent outbox rows and the event status log.Watch out for This is the single admin-shaped API a scoped host may call, and only for their own event. Put another promoter's event id in the URL and you get 403 forbidden.
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3Read reserved and sold as different things: reserved is inventory held by someone mid-checkout on a short timer, sold is paid. Gross counts only what was paid.Expected result Reserved numbers that rise and fall on their own through the evening.Watch out for Do not announce a sell-out off the back of reserved. A tier at cap because of holds can drop back below cap minutes later when those holds expire, and the platform will reopen it automatically.
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4Look at your own event the way your audience does, on the public page, while it is selling.Expected result Live availability, countdowns, and the cascade headline when a tier unlocks.Watch out for This is the page your short links and social posts point at. If it looks wrong to you it looks wrong to everyone.
Steps 5 — Venue Manager
their manual →Can see the live holds with buyer emails — a host deliberately cannot.
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5As staff, look at who is holding inventory right now, with their email addresses and expiry times.Expected result Active holds with their line items and countdowns.Watch out for Admin and venue manager only — a scoped host gets 403 here. Buyer identity is not part of a host grant, and that is the deliberate line between 'your event' and 'our customers'.
Steps 6–7 — Admin
their manual →Owns the orders, the refunds and the invariant checks behind the same numbers.
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6As an admin, open the orders behind those counts: line items, tax, payment and refund controls.Expected result Every order for the event with its full history.Watch out for Refunding is admin-only and it is the one action here that moves money outward. A host asking for a refund to be issued is asking an admin, always.
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7When the numbers look impossible, dump the event state and check the invariants: expected versus actual reserved counts recomputed from live reservation items.Expected result A full dump with an invariants block that says ok or names the drifting tier.Watch out for Admin-only debug. Reserved-count drift is repairable; do not fix it by editing the tier row by hand.