How to take church event sign-ups by household instead of by person

Why does asking for every name up front lose sign-ups?

Because the person booking usually does not have them. A parent signing up for a holiday club knows their children's names, but they do not know whether Grandma is coming, and they certainly do not know her dietary requirements while standing in the church hall after a service with a phone in one hand.

The form that demands everything at once converts that into "I will do it later", and later is a smaller number than now. Taking the booking first and the details afterwards keeps the moment of intent and moves the admin to a time when the information is actually to hand.

How does a household booking actually work?

The person booking says how many places the household needs and gives the household name and their own details. When the order is confirmed, the engine creates one roster slot for each place that was PAID FOR — not one per name given — so six places produce six slots even if only one name exists.

From there, two routes fill them in. The person who booked has a link to their roster and can type the names themselves, or send an individual place to the person taking it, who fills in their own details from their own link. For a teenager with their own email, or a friend joining a family group, the second route is usually the one that gets accurate information.

• Book the number of places first; names are not required to pay.
• The person who booked gets a roster link that works for the whole household.
• Any single place can be sent onward to the person taking it.
• Each filled-in place is validated in full, so a half-completed one is refused.
• Details filled in after the money moved still reach every session of the event.

What happens at the door to a place nobody named?

It is not on the door list, and a check-in against it is refused with the reason given. This is deliberate: the alternative — admitting an unnamed place — means you have a person in the building whose name you never recorded, at an event that may involve children.

It also gives you a clean nudge list. A week out, the unfilled slots are exactly the households to chase, and chasing four families for one name each is a different job from reconciling a spreadsheet.

How do household rates work with all this?

Publish a household price and the number of places it starts at, and the price is applied server-side when an order qualifies. A family of five booking five places gets the household rate on the money path; nothing in the browser decides that, and no request that names its own amount is honoured.

One thing congregations do not get is a verified membership discount. Member and non-member prices exist as a pricing model, but checking a person against a membership roster is not enabled for this vertical — so a "member price" here is a price you publish, not an entitlement the system verifies.

What about the children in the household?

Marking a place as being for someone under 18 asks for a parent or guardian's own email address, and raises a countersign request to that address in the same transaction that takes the money. The child is kept off the door list until the guardian signs from their own link.

When a place is filled in after the booking — Grandma's place turning out to be a twelve-year-old cousin's — the consent request is raised then, for that place. There is no window in which a minor exists on the order without the consent that gates their admission.