Sell tickets to any school event online, take payment straight into your own account, and scan people in at the door. Whether it is the School Ball, a production, prizegiving, a quiz night or a fundraising dinner, eTickets handles the selling so your team can get on with running the event.

eTickets is built into SchoolBridge, which means it already knows your families. That is the difference between a general ticketing website and one made for schools.

Reserved seating, drawn to match your hall

Most ticketing systems offer general admission and leave you to sort out seating on the night. eTickets lets you draw your actual hall - rows, aisles, blocked seats for the pillar in row F, accessible spaces, a balcony if you have one - and lets families choose exactly where they want to sit.

You build the plan once with a simple visual editor. No spreadsheets, no seating charts drawn by hand, no phone calls about who is sitting where. Add ten rows of twenty seats in one click, then click seats to turn them into aisles or block them off. Seats renumber themselves so every row still reads sensibly.

Once a plan is drawn it is yours to reuse. The same hall works for the production, prizegiving and next year's show without redrawing anything.

On the event page, families pick their seats from the map. Taken seats are greyed out and update as other people buy, so two people cannot end up with the same seat. The seat number then follows the ticket all the way through - onto the printed ticket, into the confirmation email, and onto the scanner at the door.

Price it however your event works

• Early bird pricing with its own sales window, switching to standard pricing automatically.
• Family and group tickets - one ticket that admits four people, takes four seats and produces four scannable codes, but appears as a single line at checkout.
• Group discounts that kick in once someone buys a set number.
• Promo codes for a percentage or fixed amount off, with expiry dates and usage limits.
• Hidden tickets unlocked by a code - a staff rate or a cast family allocation that the general public never sees.
• Donations alongside ticket sales, either any amount, a fixed amount, a minimum, or a set of suggested amounts.
• Purchase limits per order or per person, so one family cannot take the whole front row.

Ask what you actually need to know

Add your own questions to the checkout - dietary requirements, accessibility needs, a name for the place card, whatever the event calls for. Ask once per order, or once for every ticket.

Because eTickets is part of SchoolBridge, one question type stands out: which student is this for? When a parent is logged in, their own children are offered by name. They pick from a list instead of typing, and the order is linked to the student. That means you can answer questions no external ticketing site can, like which families came to the production.

Logged-in caregivers also get their name, email and phone filled in for them, which removes most of the friction that loses sales on a phone.

Sold out? Do not just say no

When tickets run out, the page invites people to join a waitlist rather than turning them away. If seats free up - a cancellation, or an unpaid order that expires - you can notify the waitlist in one click.

It emails people in the order they joined, and only those whose requested number is genuinely available, so a couple of returned seats does not summon fifty people to race for two spots.

On the night

Scan tickets at the door with a phone or a plug-in barcode scanner. Every scan gives a clear answer: admit, or the reason not to. If a ticket has already been used you are told what time it was first scanned, so whoever is on the gate can make a sensible call instead of guessing.

Crucially, the person scanning does not need a staff login. Doors are usually run by parent helpers and senior students, and eTickets is built for that.

Alongside the scanner is a live screen showing tickets sold, money taken, how many people have arrived, and — the one everybody ends up using — a list of who has bought but not yet come through the door, with their seat number. When someone at the door cannot find their email, you can look them up and wave them in.

Selling in the office and at the gate

Not every sale happens online. Record cash, EFTPOS and bank transfer sales in the office, and issue complimentary tickets for sponsors, performers' families and VIPs. They are recorded exactly like an online sale, so your totals and reports stay complete and your reconciliation stays simple.

Reporting that reconciles

• Live sales figures per event and across the year.
• A breakdown by ticket type showing what sold and how many turned up.
• Export everything to a spreadsheet, with a column for every question you asked.
• Unique reference on every order, prefixed however you like so payments are easy to spot on your statement.
• Every successful payment recorded centrally alongside the rest of your school's payments — online, cash and complimentary in one place.

Promote it without retyping it

Publish the event to your school calendar and to notices with one click each. The name, dates and description come straight from the event, and updating it later updates what you published rather than creating duplicates.

You can also email ticket holders directly — a reminder the day before, or a last call to the waitlist. Nothing sends automatically. Every message goes out when you press the button, and you can see exactly who it reached and when.

Payments, handled properly

Payment goes through your school's own payment provider and into your own account. Add a surcharge if you need to cover fees, or absorb it.

Unpaid orders hold their tickets for a few minutes and then release them automatically, so abandoned checkouts never leave an event looking sold out when it is not. Cancel an order and the seats go straight back on sale.

Built for schools, not adapted for them

Anyone can sell you a ticketing platform. What they cannot do is know who your families are.

• Parents log in with the account they already have.
• Orders link to students, so your reporting means something.
• Door staff can be helpers rather than staff.
• Events publish to your calendar and notices without retyping.
• Payments sit alongside the rest of your school's payments.
• Fees are not taken out of your ticket revenue.