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Approving attendees ​

Some events need a human to decide who gets in — invite-only conferences, member-only meetups, press and VIP passes, or any registration you want to vet before it counts. BagEvent handles this with an approval (audit) step: registrations for a chosen ticket type land in a Pending review queue instead of being confirmed straight away, and nobody is charged or issued a ticket until you approve them.

This page explains how to turn approval on, work the queue, and what happens to the order, the inventory, and the attendee's inbox at each step.

How approval works ​

Approval is set per ticket type, not per event. When a ticket requires approval:

  1. A registrant fills in your form and places their order as usual.
  2. The order is held in a pending review state. The seat is reserved so it can't be oversold, but the registrant cannot pay yet and no e-ticket is issued.
  3. You approve or reject each attendee.
  4. On approval the order is finalized — either confirmed outright (free registrations) or moved to awaiting payment (paid tickets). On rejection the attendee's seat is released back into inventory.

Because the flag lives on the ticket, a single order can mix reviewed and non-reviewed tickets. The order stays in review until every attendee on it has a decision.

TIP

Approval and payment don't collide: a paid, approval-required ticket is only offered for payment after you approve it. This avoids charging someone you later turn away.

Turning on approval ​

You enable approval when you create or edit a ticket type.

  1. Go to Tickets.
  2. Create a new ticket or open an existing one.
  3. Tick Purchasing this ticket requires my approval.
  4. Save.

From then on, every new registration for that ticket enters the review queue. Existing, already-confirmed registrations are not retroactively pulled back for review.

WARNING

Turning approval on part-way through selling only affects future registrations. People who already completed checkout keep their confirmed tickets.

Choose which emails go out ​

Approval-related emails are controlled by two switches under Tickets → General settings (they apply to all ticket types, and send by email):

SettingWhat it controls
Send success notificationThe confirmation email — with the e-ticket — sent when a registration becomes confirmed.
Send audit result notificationA separate message telling the registrant the outcome of their review (approved or rejected).

Leave both on if you want attendees kept informed at every step. Turn one off if you'd rather handle that communication yourself.

Reviewing pending registrations ​

Open Attendees. The list is split into tabs; the one you want is Pending review, which shows everyone awaiting a decision. The count next to the tab is your outstanding workload.

  • Use the search box (name, email, phone) and the ticket / identity filters to narrow the list.
  • The Audit column shows a status only for tickets that actually require approval — other rows stay blank, so a real decision is never confused with a default.
  • Click any row to open the attendee, read their full form answers, and act on them individually.

You can act on registrations one at a time or in bulk.

Approve or reject one attendee ​

  1. In Pending review, click the attendee to open their detail panel.
  2. Review their form answers, ticket, and any notes.
  3. Choose Approve or Reject.

Approve or reject in bulk ​

  1. On the Pending review tab, tick the checkboxes for the registrations you want.
  2. Choose Approve selected or Reject selected.
  3. If you're rejecting, you're prompted for an optional reason that is recorded with the decision.

TIP

Selection applies to the rows currently shown. Filter or search first, then use the header checkbox to select the whole filtered page at once.

What approving does ​

Approving marks the attendee as approved. The order only advances once every attendee on it has been decided (no one is still pending). At that point BagEvent finalizes the order based on what it costs:

  • Free registration (nothing to pay): the order is confirmed immediately. The registrant is counted as attending, the success email and e-ticket go out (if Send success notification is on), and an approval notice is sent (if Send audit result notification is on).
  • Paid ticket: the order moves to awaiting payment. This is the moment the registrant can finally pay, so the unpaid-order countdown starts here. They receive the approval notice and can complete payment; the ticket is issued once they've paid.

In a group order where you approve people one by one, the order waits for the last decision before it transitions — so a half-reviewed group stays in the queue.

WARNING

An approved-but-unpaid registrant is not yet attending. They sit under the Awaiting payment tab, and if they never pay, their held seat is released automatically when the order times out.

Rejecting and releasing inventory ​

Rejecting is designed so one turned-away person never costs you the rest of a group.

When you reject a single attendee:

  • They're marked rejected and cancelled.
  • Their one seat is released back into inventory immediately, so it's available for someone else.
  • Everyone else on the same order is left untouched and still valid.

Only when every attendee on an order has been rejected (or was already cancelled) does the whole order get cancelled. At that point BagEvent also:

  • releases any add-on stock the order held,
  • frees the discount code use back up so the code isn't permanently consumed by a rejected registration, and
  • if the order had somehow already been paid, issues a real refund through the payment provider before marking it refunded. If that refund can't be completed, the rejection fails so you can retry rather than believing money was returned when it wasn't.

TIP

Rejecting from the queue is the clean way to decline someone: it returns the seat, the add-ons, and the promo-code use to your available pool without any manual cleanup.

Notifications attendees receive ​

Assuming the matching switch is on, a registrant going through approval can receive:

  1. At submission — depending on your setup, an acknowledgement that their registration was received and is pending review.
  2. On approval (free ticket) — the confirmation email with their e-ticket, plus an approval notice.
  3. On approval (paid ticket) — an approval notice inviting them to pay; the e-ticket follows once payment succeeds.
  4. On rejection — an audit-result message telling them they weren't approved (with your optional reason, where included).

All of these are email notifications. Which ones fire is governed by the Send success notification and Send audit result notification switches described above.

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