What Pencilled does, and how each part behaves

An event has a name, a location, a description with basic formatting, a hero image and a gallery of up to eight photos. Each event contains sessions, and every session has its own start time, end time, capacity and price per person.

You can add sessions one at a time, or build a run of them with the generator. Give it a date range, an opening and closing time, the length of each session (five minutes or more), the gap between sessions, the capacity and the price. It creates every session that fits before closing time, and skips any start time that already exists, so running it twice does not double up.

Afterwards you can change a session, close it so it stops taking bookings without deleting it, or delete it.

Customers choose a session, say how many places they want (up to four in one booking), give a name, an email address and an optional phone number, and pay by card. The page shows how many places are left in each session, and a session with none left shows as sold out.

When someone starts to pay, their places are held for 15 minutes. If they pay, the booking is confirmed. If they do not, the places go back on the session automatically, so two people are not asked to pay for the same last place.

On a sold-out session, customers can join a waitlist. When a place opens up, because a booking was cancelled or a hold ran out, the next person on the list is emailed. The email does not reserve the place, so whoever books first gets it.

Card payments go through Stripe Checkout, into your own Stripe account (a Stripe Standard account that you connect from the dashboard settings). Payments are made to that account and Stripe pays them out to you. The platform fee is taken from each payment as it is made.

From the bookings screen you can cancel a booking, or refund one. A refund of a card payment is sent back to the customer through Stripe, including the platform fee on that payment, and the place goes back on the session. If Stripe refuses the refund, the booking is left as it was.

The bookings list can be searched, filtered by status and downloaded as a CSV. The dashboard shows takings net of refunds, confirmed bookings and upcoming sessions.

Promo codes take a percentage or a fixed amount off a booking. You can cap the number of times a code can be used, give it an expiry date and switch it off. A code that covers the whole price confirms the booking without a payment step.

Gift vouchers are sold from your operator page, once your Stripe account is connected, in amounts from £10 to £200. The purchaser gets the code by email, and can send it on to a recipient. A voucher is valid for 12 months from purchase. At checkout the customer enters the code, the balance comes off the price, and any remainder is paid by card. You can also issue a voucher yourself with no payment, and void one from the vouchers screen.

Build a questionnaire in the dashboard from headings, short and long answers, yes or no questions, choices, dates and declarations the attendee has to tick. Set one as your default or choose one for a single event.

Each attendee gets their own link to the form. It is in their confirmation email, on the booking success page, on their ticket and in their account, and it needs no login. You can see how many forms are complete next to each booking at check-in, read the responses by event and session, and download them as a CSV.

Answers can include health information. They are kept until you delete them, and each event has a delete all action for once the event is over. The privacy policy sets out how this data is handled.

A confirmed booking gets an email with its reference, a link to a ticket page with a QR code, and a calendar file. When you are signed in as the operator, the ticket page has a check-in button. There is also a check-in screen that lists everyone booked into a session so you can tick people off by name.

Kiosk mode is a full-screen flow for a tablet. Pick a session, tap an attendee and capture their form. You can also take a booking on the spot for someone without one: name, how many people and how they paid, which is cash, card on your own reader, or no charge. These bookings are confirmed straight away, and they appear in the bookings list and CSV marked as walk-ins, so cash and card takings can be reconciled.

Walk-in bookings are written to the tablet before they are sent, so a lack of signal does not stop you taking them. They are sent when the connection comes back, and each is only created once even if the tablet retries.

Every event has its own booking page. To put it on another site, add one script tag with your operator and event slugs. It inserts the booking page in an iframe that resizes to fit.

There is a read-only JSON API for your published events and their sessions, with live availability, that any website can read from. You can also give Pencilled a webhook address and it will send a short notice when your events change, at most once a minute, so your own site knows to fetch the new data.

Customers can sign in at /account with a six-digit code sent to their email, with no password to remember. It lists their bookings, tickets and any forms still to complete, and fills in answers they have given before. Declarations always start unticked.

On your side, you can add colleagues to your account with their own logins, and set your logo and brand colour so the booking page looks like yours.

Platform fee

5% of each card payment taken through Pencilled

Set-up and monthly cost

None

Card processing

Stripe’s own fees apply on top, charged by Stripe to your account

Payouts

Paid by Stripe to your own account

Walk-in bookings paid in cash or on your own card reader do not go through Pencilled’s payment flow, so no platform fee is taken on them.

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