Part 2 — Install the plugin

1. Log in to your WordPress admin at https://yoursite.com/wp-admin with an administrator account.
2. Upload the plugin. Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, click Choose File, pick venyall-3.0.0.zip, then Install Now.

   

3. Activate it. Click Activate Plugin. You can also activate later from the Plugins list.

   

4. You land on the Setup Guide. A new Ticketing menu appears in the left sidebar. Its first tab is a built-in guide that walks the same steps as this manual; keep it open as a checklist.

   

5. Install an email plugin now so you do not forget: Plugins → Add New, search for WP Mail SMTP, install, activate, and connect it to a real mailbox (Gmail, Outlook, or your host's mail). Ticket receipts will not reliably arrive until this is done.

Part 3 — Set it up, tab by tab

Everything venue-specific lives under Ticketing in the WordPress admin. There are nine tabs. This part covers the four you must fill in; Part 8 covers the optional ones.

Step 1 — Selling Tickets tab: your venue and your prices

1. Venue name. Used on receipts, artist emails and the staff login screen.
2. Venue time zone — do not skip this. Pick the city closest to your venue. WordPress installs on UTC, and every clock in Venyall runs on this setting: when online sales close, which day a show belongs to, the poster screens, and the door screen's 10 AM "new day" rollover. The Status tab shows a red warning until it is set. (This is the same setting as WordPress's Settings → General, just put where you need it.)
3. Public contact email — where buyers reply. Problem alerts go to — if a card is charged but the ticket fails to save, this inbox is told immediately. Use one someone reads.
4. Sales tax rate. Your local rate as a percentage, e.g. 9.75. Enter 0 if you do not collect tax on tickets.
5. Card fees. Stripe's standard US pricing is 2.9% + 30¢; check your own Stripe pricing page. With Customer pays tax and card fees ticked, a $10 ticket shows as $10 plus tax and fee at checkout and the artist settlement is based on the full $10.
6. Sales rules. Max tickets per order; how many hours past midnight online sales stay open on show night (3 = 3 AM); the time of day a show's door price replaces its advance price; and a default room capacity for shows that do not set their own (0 = no limit).
7. Optional tip prompt. Ask buyers to add a few dollars for the venue. Tips are tracked separately and never included in artist settlements. You can write {tip_amount} in the wording. Fill in the "second ask" fields only if you want one more polite pitch after a "No thanks".
8. After they buy. The heading and message on the thank-you screen and receipt email. {venue_name} and {event_title} are filled in for you.
9. Door list labels — what your comp categories are called on the settlement sheet (guest list, band members, regulars…).
10. Usual door times — e.g. 6:00 PM, 9:00 PM. The upcoming-shows audit (Part 5) flags any show whose doors are at a different time, which catches typos like 8:00 AM.
11. Meta (Facebook) pixel ID — your venue's pixel, if you run Meta ads. Venyall fires it on every show page (ViewContent), the checkout (InitiateCheckout) and the receipt (Purchase, with the order value and the Stripe charge id). Leave it blank if a tag manager already installs your pixel: Purchase still reaches any pixel on the page, and the receipt pushes a ticket_purchase event with orderValue and orderId to the data layer for tag-manager triggers. Promoters and bands add their own pixel on the show itself (Part 5), and every pixel listed gets every event.
12. Click Save Settings at the bottom.

Step 2 — Stripe tab: keys and webhooks

1. Get your two API keys. In the Stripe dashboard go to Developers → API keys. Copy the Publishable key (starts pk_live_) and the Secret key (starts sk_live_; Stripe shows it once when you reveal it). Paste both into the Stripe tab and save.
   Treat the secret key like a bank password. Never paste it into email or chat. If it ever leaks, roll it in Stripe and paste the new one here.
2. Create the ticket webhook. A webhook is how Stripe tells your site "this payment succeeded". In Stripe go to Developers → Webhooks → Add endpoint and enter:
   • Endpoint URL: https://yoursite.com/wp-json/venyall/v1/stripe-webhook
   • Event to listen for: payment_intent.succeeded
   After saving, open the endpoint, click Reveal under Signing secret (starts whsec_), and paste it into Ticket fulfilment secret.
3. Only if you will pay artists through Stripe (Part 8): add a second endpoint at …/wp-json/venyall/v1/connect-webhook listening for account.updated and charge.refunded, and paste its secret into Artist onboarding secret.
4. Only if you will sell show recordings (Part 8): a third endpoint at …/wp-json/venyall/v1/recording-paid listening for checkout.session.completed, secret into Recording purchases secret.
5. Only if you have a card reader: in Stripe, Terminal → Locations, open your location and copy its ID (starts tml_) into Terminal location ID.

Step 3 — Emails tab

Set the subject line of the ticket email and the artist invitation, and write your ticket policy (refunds, transfers). The policy appears on the thank-you screen and in the receipt email. Placeholders such as {event_title} and {venue_name} are filled in automatically.

Step 4 — Appearance tab (optional, but quick)

Choose a colour preset for the public screens (event grid, calendar, checkout) or set your accent, background and text colours to match your site. Staff screens have a separate light/dark palette because they are working tools, not your storefront. The calendar colours by time of day (daytime, early, prime, private) are adjustable here too.

Part 4 — Make your pages and add your team

Step 5 — Create the pages

Venyall's screens live on ordinary WordPress pages. You put one shortcode (a short tag in square brackets) on each page and the plugin fills the page with that screen. Create these pages first; the checkout and staff pages are required, the rest are recommended.

1. Add a page: Pages → Add New. Type the title, then in the content area type the shortcode exactly as shown (including the square brackets). Click Publish.

   

2. Repeat for each page in the table. Your Pages list will look like this:

   

3. Tell Venyall where each page is: Ticketing → Pages & Shortcodes, pick each page from its dropdown, and save. The plugin uses these to send staff and artists to the right place after they log in.

   

4. Refresh permalinks once: Settings → Permalinks, click Save Changes without changing anything. This registers the /door-pos/ address for the door screen.

   

5. Add the public pages to your site menu (Appearance → Menus, or the Site Editor's navigation block) so visitors can find Events and Calendar. Do not put the staff pages in the public menu — they are login-protected, but there is no reason to advertise them.

Step 6 — Add your team

Staff log in with normal WordPress accounts but never see the WordPress admin: they land on the staff dashboard and cannot install plugins, change settings or edit your site. There are four roles, each scoped to a job.

1. Go to Users → Add New.
2. Enter a username and the person's own email address (password resets go there).
3. Leave Send User Notification ticked so they set their own password.
4. Choose the role from the Role dropdown and click Add New User.

   

Step 7 — Check the Status tab

Part 5 — Your first show and a test purchase

Add a show

Open your Staff Dashboard page (the one with [venue_staff_dashboard]) while logged in. The left side is the month calendar; the right side is the event editor.

1. Basic details: title (usually the headliner's name), date, door time, optional end time.
2. Ticketing & pricing: advance price, an optional door price (takes over at the time you set on the Selling tab), and capacity. Tick Enable DJ payout structure only for a DJ night paid as base + percentage instead of a production fee.
3. The deal: your production fee (the flat amount the venue keeps before the artist is paid) or the DJ base pay and percentage. This drives the settlement math later, so enter it when you book the show.
4. Artists: add each band from the directory, or use Invite New Account to email a band that is not in it yet. Adding the band here is what lets you pay them from the door screen later. Picked the wrong one? Click the ✕ beside it and press Update Event; or use Remove from this show under their card on the settlement screen, or Remove in the audit's payout popup. An artist who has already been paid for the show cannot be removed.
5. Poster and blurb: upload the poster and write the description, or leave it to the band — they can add both from their portal link.
6. Private or public: a private show stays off the public grid until you flip it, or until the automatic "make public on" date you set.
7. Tickets sold elsewhere: if a promoter sells the show through their own ticketing service, paste their link into External Ticket Link. The Get Tickets button on the events grid and on the show page then opens their page in a new tab, the checkout page on your site shows a button to the same link and sells nothing, and the audit marks the row "tickets sold elsewhere" and stops asking for a ticket price or capacity. The box office can still sell at the door. Clear the field to sell the show on your own site again.
8. Promoter tracking: a promoter or band running ads can have their Meta pixel ID entered here (several, separated by commas). Each pixel then records views, checkouts and purchases for this show alongside the venue's own pixel. Bands can also add theirs from their portal link.
9. Click Create Event (or Update Event when editing). It appears on the calendar and, if public, on your Events page within a minute.

Repeating shows. Tick This event repeats to create a weekly or monthly run. Later, saving or deleting any date in the run opens a popup listing every future date with a checkbox (all ticked), so a new door time or poster can go to the whole run or only to the dates you leave ticked. Older runs that were only linked by name get the same popup, matched by title, and are linked properly the first time you apply a change.

Finding a show. The search box above the calendar lists every matching show on any date: upcoming ones first (green), then past ones (red). Click one to open it.

The upcoming-shows audit

Next to the calendar search box is Audit next month. It replaces the calendar with one table of every show from today through the next 31 days, with the things that go wrong before a show highlighted:

• Red box — no production fee, a door time that is not one of your usual times, no ticket price, or no poster. DJ nights are not flagged for a fee, and a waived fee shows as "fee waived".
• Amber box — a capacity different from your house presale limit (the Default capacity setting). A blank capacity means the house limit. The limit only caps online sales; the door screen keeps selling at staff discretion.
• Payout to — the artists set up to be paid. Green means ready, amber means they have not finished their Stripe setup, and a red No payout account means nobody is attached. Click any of them to open a popup where you can add an artist from your directory, send a pending artist a reminder, or invite a new artist by name and email (which creates their payout account, emails the setup link and adds them to the show).

A show that is right as entered but still red (an unusual door time that is correct, say) can be ticked checked ok on its row, which turns its flags off and marks it with a green tick. A ticket price of 0 means a free show: it shows as FREE SHOW here, "Free Show" on the public grid and "Free" on the show page, with no buy button and no fee flag. A blank price is still flagged, because that is a show nobody has priced yet.

Every field in the table is editable in place: title, date, doors, end time, prices, production fee, the waived box, capacity and hidden. Change as many rows as you like; the counter at the top shows how many are unsaved, and Save all changes (or any row's Save button) writes all of them at once. The browser warns you before leaving with unsaved rows.

What the public sees

Make one real purchase — do not skip this

1. Create a test show a few days out, price $1, capacity 2.
2. Open its public page and buy a ticket with a real card.
3. Confirm all four: the thank-you screen appears (and refreshing it does not charge you again); the receipt email arrives; your name is on the show's will-call list; the charge is in your Stripe dashboard.
4. Refund the $1 in Stripe and delete the test show. If any of the four failed, see Part 9 before selling real tickets.

Part 6 — Show night

The door screen (box office kiosk)

On the door tablet, open https://yoursite.com/door-pos/ and sign in with the Box Office account once — it stays signed in. The screen takes over the whole browser window and is built for fingers, not a mouse. It shows tonight's shows in the dropdown and switches to the next show automatically an hour before doors. The clock in the corner is venue time, even if the tablet is set to another zone.

How the card reader connects. The Stripe reader is an internet reader: it joins your wifi and reports itself to Stripe, and the door screen never talks to it directly. The screen asks Stripe which readers are at your location and asks Stripe to pair it with one. So the reader must be on, finished starting (a minute or two) and showing its home screen, and the screen has to ask after that. Any computer, tablet or laptop that opens /door-pos/ and signs in as the box office pairs the same way, with no cables or drivers; press Connect Reader if it has not paired itself. Only one screen should be charging cards at a time, so if the door computer is replaced by a tablet, finish on one device before switching. If the button keeps saying no reader was found, check the reader in the Stripe Dashboard under Terminal → Readers: it should show Online, at the location entered under Ticketing → Stripe.

Settling up (the Door List)

From the staff dashboard, open the show and click Door Dashboard & Settlement. This is the manager's screen for closing out a show. It needs the Venue Manager role because the buttons on it move money.

How the math works. The gross pool is online sales + card walk-ups + cash walk-ups (face value, before tax and fees). The venue takes its production fee out of the cash drawer first; whatever cash is left goes to the band in hand. If the drawer did not cover the fee, the rest of the fee comes out of the online/card money, and the band's remaining share is paid through Stripe. The Unpaid Balance box is what the band is still owed electronically.

1. Check the numbers — the walk-up counts come from the door screen; online sales are automatic. Bar sales and headcount appear at the top if the bar add-on is on.
2. Pay the band: the amount in the band's card is pre-filled with what the math says. Click Pay Account to send a Stripe transfer to their connected account. The card turns green and shows PAID. Use + Pay More for a top-up; there is no undo for a transfer, because the money has moved.
3. Record the venue cut: the venue's own card is bookkeeping only (no money moves) — it tells the sales dashboard how much of the Stripe balance is yours.
4. Paid them in cash instead? Click Mark Paid Externally so the show stops showing as unpaid.
5. Fee not collected? If the door staff forgot to hold back the production fee and the band walked with all the cash, click Fee Not Collected – Waive. The fee becomes $0 for this show only (undo available) and every other screen agrees.
6. Export PDF gives you the settlement sheet for your records or the band.
7. Door staff tapped a cash sale twice? Under the walk-up lines, click Correct walk-up counts. Type the cash and card ticket counts and face-value dollars as they should be, add a note, and save. The settlement, the calendar tick and the sales dashboard all follow the corrected numbers, and the old figures stay in a log on the show. Card corrections only change the count; the Stripe charge itself is untouched, so refund from Stripe if money has to go back.

Recordings. If the sound crew uploaded recordings for the show, a Recordings table sits under Band Payouts: each file, the engineer who recorded it, the tier, and whether the band has bought it yet (green YES with the amount and download count, amber NOT YET with the price, blue COMP for a free one). It is read-only here; comping and settling the engineer happen on the crew calendar and the Sales dashboard.

Refunds and cancellations

Refunds are made from inside Venyall, not by hand in Stripe, so the will-call list, the capacity count, the artist's payout, the tips and the sales-tax month all drop the ticket at the same moment the money goes back. A refunded ticket is never deleted: it stays on record, flagged, and simply stops counting.

One buyer. On the settlement screen (Door Dashboard & Settlement), every name on the will-call list has a Refund button. It offers two choices:

• Refund through Stripe & remove — returns the full amount they paid (ticket, tax, card fee and any tip) to their card and takes every ticket in that order off the list. Refunds show on the buyer's statement in 5–10 business days. The buyer is not emailed; tell them yourself.
• Remove from list only — for a charge you already refunded in the Stripe dashboard, a comp, or a cash or imported ticket. Nothing is charged or refunded; the ticket just stops counting.

A whole show. In the event editor, next to Delete, is Cancel show & refund tickets. It refunds every online charge and every box-office card sale for that show through Stripe, takes every ticket (including comps) off the list, emails every buyer whose refund went through, closes ticket sales, and marks the show Cancelled on the public grid, both calendars and the show page. The show itself stays in your calendar (grey, marked CANCELLED) so the record is there; delete it when you are done with it, or Undo cancellation if the show is back on. The wording of the cancellation email is on the Emails tab.

Deleting a show with tickets sold does the same refunds first and only moves the show to the Trash once every refund has gone through. If Stripe refuses a refund (a closed card, an outage), that show stays live with its buyers still on the list, you see exactly which refund failed and why, and pressing the button again retries only the ones that failed.

Repeating shows. Saving or deleting a date that belongs to a repeating series opens a list of every future date in the run, each with a checkbox (all ticked to start). Untick the dates you want left alone. For a delete, each date shows how many paid tickets it has and how much would be refunded, so you can see the money before you press the button.

Part 7 — Money: the sales dashboard

The Sales page ([venue_sales_dashboard]) is the manager's money screen. It is organised into five numbered sections in the order you use them.

1 · Live Sales

A one-line summary of the last 24 hours. Click Show all sales to expand the full list of recent orders (buyer, event, quantity, tip).

∞ · Since Day One

Lifetime totals: tickets sold, face value, tips, and service fees fans did not pay. Press Rebuild from Stripe and it reads every charge in your Stripe account in chunks (with a progress readout), so it covers your whole history including card-reader walk-ups at the door, not just what the website recorded. Cash sales, passes, comps and refunds are left out. The table breaks sales down by ticket price with online and door counts; the service fee per ticket boxes are editable, with presets for common ticketing-company fee structures, so you can show what fans saved against any competitor. Download CSV gives one row per ticket.

2 · Bank Transfer

Stripe pays your balance to your bank, but not all of that balance is yours: some is owed to artists for shows not yet settled, and advance sales for upcoming shows are spoken for. The transfer advisor reads your live Stripe balance, subtracts Hold for bands, and shows Safe to transfer now. The steps on screen are the right order:

1. Check the numbers.
2. Make the payout in Stripe (nothing on this page moves money).
3. Record the transfer right away — before clearing anything — so the amount and what was owed at the time are kept together.
4. Clear Tips, Venue Cuts and Support Pass in Payables (that money is now in the bank).
5. Settle engineers when you actually pay them.
6. Sales tax: mark a month filed only after you have filed and paid the state.

Below the steps, Played shows still holding money back lists any show whose band has not been fully paid through Stripe. If you paid one in cash, click Paid in cash and it stops being held. Mark all before this date settled clears old shows in one go when you first start.

3 · Sales Tax by Month

One row per month: taxable online tickets and card walk-ups, tax due, and cash door sales for reference (not taxed). After you file and pay the state, click Mark filed on that month and enter the date, amount and confirmation number. Nothing is ever erased — the record is permanent, with Undo filing for mistakes and a Download CSV button for your accountant.

4 · Payables

Tips (venue revenue), venue cuts, support-pass sales and what is owed to recording engineers, each with a Clear/Settle button. Every clear is written to Payables History with the amount, date and who did it.

5 · Engineer Roster

The list of engineers that appears in the recording form (recordings add-on).

Part 8 — Optional add-ons

All of these are switched on under Ticketing → Add-Ons. Leave them off until you need them; the plugin is a complete online ticketing system without any of them.

Card reader at the door

1. In Stripe, order a Terminal reader and register it under Terminal → Locations. Copy the location ID (tml_…) into the Stripe tab.
2. Tick Card reader on the Add-Ons tab. The door screen's Charge Card button becomes live when the reader is awake and on the same Wi-Fi.
3. Card walk-ups are recorded by the door screen itself (with tax and fee added on top), and count toward capacity and the settlement.

Pay artists through Stripe

1. Add the connect-webhook in Stripe (Part 3, Step 2) and tick Artist payouts on the Add-Ons tab.
2. Open your Artist Directory page. Click Invite New Account, enter the band's name and email, and send. They receive a link to a Stripe-hosted form where they enter their own bank details — you never see them.

   

3. Once a band is Ready for payments, add them to a show and pay them from the Door List with one click (Part 6). Stripe transfers the money to their account; they get it on Stripe's normal schedule.
4. Bands also get a private portal link for each show (the Copy Link button in the event editor's share block) where they can edit their blurb and poster, watch ticket sales, and buy a recording of the show if you sell them.

Bar sales from a Google Sheet

If your bar closeout lives in a Google Sheet, paste its published-CSV link and the column numbers on the Add-Ons tab. The door list and the Bar page then show bar sales, headcount and average spend per show, so you can see whether a show actually made money. The Show types settings decide which columns a daytime, early, late or Sunday show reads from; the defaults match a typical two-show night.

Sell show recordings and pay the engineer

If you record shows, bands can buy the recording from their portal. On the Add-Ons tab set your formats and prices (for example Multitrack Audio $50, Program + Audio $150, Full A/V $250) and what the engineer earns per sale. Add the recording-paid webhook in Stripe. Purchases mark themselves paid, the band gets the download link, and the Sales dashboard tallies what each engineer is owed.

The download window. A recording stays available for a set number of days after it is uploaded: 21 unless you change Download window on the Add-Ons tab. When the crew adds a recording the band is emailed the portal link, the price and the deadline. One reminder goes out a few days before the deadline (Remind the artist, 5 days by default) unless they already have their files. The band's portal shows "Available until…" with the days left, and after the deadline it can no longer be bought. Wording for both emails is on the Emails tab.

What happens at the deadline. Once a day Venyall goes through the recordings that have passed their window:

• Never bought, or bought and downloaded: cleared off the drive.
• Paid for but never downloaded: held, never cleared automatically. You get an email naming the show and the buyer so you can chase them. Clear it yourself once they have their files.

The Recordings on the drive list, under the crew calendar and on the Sales dashboard, shows every recording still stored, its size, deadline and state, with +7 days to extend one, Clear now, and Mark deleted for one you removed by hand.

Connect Google Drive (optional, about ten minutes, once)

Without this, the crew uploads to Drive, sets the folder to "Anyone with the link", pastes the link into the portal, and someone deletes expired recordings by hand and ticks them off. With it, the crew only drags a folder into Drive and picks it from a list: the size fills in, the link stays private until the band pays, and expired recordings are cleared for you.

The connection uses a Google service account: a robot identity that you create and share your Recordings folder with. Nobody stays signed in and nothing expires.

1. In Google Drive, make a folder called Recordings (or use the one you already have) with the Google account that owns your storage.
2. Go to console.cloud.google.com, signed in to that same Google account. Create a project; call it anything, such as "Venue recordings".
3. APIs & Services → Library, search for Google Drive API, and click Enable.
4. IAM & Admin → Service Accounts → Create service account. Give it a name, click through the optional steps, and finish.
5. Open the new service account, go to Keys → Add key → Create new key → JSON. A .json file downloads. Keep it private: it is a password.
6. Copy the service account's email address (it ends in .iam.gserviceaccount.com). In Drive, right-click the Recordings folder → Share, paste that address, set it to Editor, and share.
7. In WordPress, Ticketing → Add-Ons → Google Drive connection for recordings: paste the Recordings folder's address from your browser into Recordings folder link, open the .json file in a text editor and paste all of it into Google service account key, and save. The section should now say Connected to the folder "Recordings". The key is stored and never shown again; type DISCONNECT in that box to remove it.

The sound crew's routine with Drive connected

1. On the sound Mac, once: install Google Drive for desktop and sign in. The Recordings folder appears in Finder under Google Drive.
2. After the show: name the show's folder with the date and act, for example 2026-10-01 Blue Band, and drag it from the SSD into the Recordings folder in Finder. Drive uploads it in the background and picks up where it left off if the Mac sleeps. Half a terabyte takes about eleven hours on a 100 Mbps upload line, so leave it overnight. Drive needs working space on the Mac while it uploads; if the internal disk is small, point Drive's cache at the SSD under Drive's Preferences → Settings → Local cached files directory.
3. When it has finished syncing: open the show from the crew calendar. Under Show Recordings, the folder is listed under "Pick the folder you dropped into Drive". Tick it, choose which act the recording is of (the show's payout artists are listed first, then your whole directory, or type a name), the engineer and the format, and add a note if you like. Send the recording email to fills in when that act has an email on file; type or correct it otherwise. The act recorded is often not the act being paid, so nobody is emailed just for being on the payout: the email and the reminder go only to the address in that box. Press Add Recording.
4. That is all. One folder per act if the acts buy separately.

Recordings from before you connected. Automatic clearing only applies to recordings uploaded after the connection was switched on. Older ones are never swept away on their own; they sit on the list marked "uploaded before auto-clear" until you press Clear now on each.

Where cleared recordings go. Google only lets a file's owner put it in the trash. On an ordinary Drive the robot cannot do that, so it closes the link and moves the folder into _Expired - safe to delete inside Recordings. Open that folder now and then, select everything, delete, and empty the trash: that is the step that frees the space. If Recordings lives in a Workspace shared drive and the robot is a Content manager there, it trashes expired recordings itself and Google removes them after 30 days.

For the band. A big recording is a Drive folder, and Google's own "Download all" struggles above a few gigabytes. Tell bands to open the folder, choose Add shortcut to Drive, and pull it down with Google Drive for desktop, or download the files one at a time.

Give your sound crew their own login

Create users with the Sound Crew role and pick the Sound Crew page under Pages & Shortcodes. Crew log in and land on a calendar of upcoming shows; each show opens the band's portal with the recording form. They cannot see the door list, money or event editing.

A season pass or membership

Create an event for it (any date), and put its ID in Evergreen product event ID under Pages & Shortcodes → Advanced. It skips the sales cutoff, shows "Ongoing" instead of a date, and pass holders are checked in from the door screen's Support Pass button. Pass sales are tallied separately on the Sales dashboard.

Part 9 — When something goes wrong

Appendix

A. Shortcodes

B. Addresses that are not pages

C. Setup checklist

D. Where things are stored

Shows and bands are WordPress "Events" and "Bands (Payouts)" entries. Tickets are one row per ticket in a table the plugin creates. Settlements, payout ledgers and recordings are saved on each show. All settings are on the Ticketing screens. Deactivating the plugin leaves everything in place; deleting it only removes data if you tick "delete data on uninstall" first.

Venyall · venyall.com · This manual describes plugin version 3.0.