How to put a season of daily admission on sale — and still get paid every month

What is an event here, and why does it decide when I get paid?

An event is a container of sessions. For a timed-entry attraction a session is one arrival slot on one day, so a month of open days at four arrival times is one event holding a few dozen sessions. Ticket tiers, capacity and the public page all hang off the event.

The payout scheduler admits an event only once every one of its sessions has ended, and then releases exactly one payout for it — two days later for this vertical, with no reserve withheld. That rule is what stops an attraction being paid for a visit it has not delivered, and it is also why the size of an event is a cash flow decision rather than a filing decision.

How should I cut the year up?

A month per event is the default that suits most small attractions: it pays monthly, it keeps a single page from listing three hundred dates, and it lets February and August carry different prices and different capacities without anybody editing a slot at midnight.

Seasons work too where the operation is genuinely seasonal — a garden open April to September, with a shorter winter event for the days it opens for snowdrops. What to avoid is the single "General Admission 2027" event: it is the tidiest thing to build and it defers every dollar of the year to the following January.

• Monthly events: paid monthly, more admin, the usual answer.
• Season events: paid at the end of the season; fine if the season is short.
• One annual event: paid once, after the year. Only sensible if you can float it.
• A separate event for anything with its own gate — evening openings, a light trail, a members' morning.

How do I generate a month of arrival slots?

Use the slot generator on the event rather than creating sessions one at a time. It takes a date range and a list of arrival times and creates a session for every combination, each with its own inventory pool per ticket type. Ten open days at four times is forty sessions in one action.

Generate the days you are actually open. There is no closed-day concept and no way to cancel a session afterwards, so a Monday you do not open should simply never have been generated. If one gets created by accident, drop its capacity to zero and it will show as fully booked.

How much capacity should each arrival slot hold?

Set capacity per slot, not per day, and set it to what the site can absorb in that window — the car park, the entrance path, the first exhibit — rather than to your total daily figure divided by the number of slots. The point of timed entry is the shape of the arrival curve.

Then add your pass holders. A season pass consumes no slot inventory: it admits at every date of its event and takes a seat at none of them, so on a warm Sunday the number of admissions sold for eleven o'clock is not the number of people arriving at eleven o'clock. Look at how many passes you have sold and leave that headroom in the busy slots.

What happens when a slot sells out?

The page says fully booked and stops. There is no waiting list, nobody is emailed when someone refunds, and — this is the part that surprises people — a refund does not return the place to sale. The sold count is never decremented.

So the lever is capacity. If you decide the eleven o'clock can take one more family, raise that slot by one and it goes back on sale immediately. Do the same in reverse to close a slot early: drop capacity to what has already sold.

What should I check before I publish?

Walk the buyer's path once on a phone. The arrival grid should show live availability, the member-price box should refuse a made-up number at the field rather than at payment, and the donation box should add to the total without adding to the fee.

• Every open day in the range has the arrival times you intended, and no closed day has any.
• Capacity per slot includes headroom for pass holders.
• Ticket tiers carry the member price where you meant them to, and the roster is current.
• The event covers a period you are content to be paid at the end of.
• Sales tax is set on the event if your state taxes admission.