Validating tickets at the door

Use the ticket validation tool to check guests in at the door, or to review tickets before or after an event. You can scan a ticket’s QR code, use an external barcode scanner, or find a ticket manually.

Open the ticket validation tool

You can open the tool in two ways:

In the top-right corner of the screen, click . This opens global ticket validation.
In the Program, choose the event, click , then select Ticket validation. See Program event actions and settings for more about the event actions menu.

The top-toolbar option is part of your layout preferences. It opens global ticket validation; opening the tool from a Program event validates against that specific event.

Choose global or event-specific validation

Both modes can scan and find tickets for any of your events. The warnings differ:

An invalid ticket or booking reference shows an error that the ticket is not valid. This applies in both modes.
In global ticket validation, a valid ticket for one of your events on a different date shows an error that the ticket is for a different event date.
In event-specific validation, a valid ticket for one of your events on the same date but for a different event shows an error.

Use global ticket validation when guests may hold bookings for more than one of your events, especially when those events take place on different dates. Use event-specific validation when the same event is held multiple times on one date.

Get to know the tool

The ticket validation tool works on desktop and mobile devices. It also works with external barcode scanners. If a barcode scanner, or an embedded barcode-scanner module, is connected to your device, it works directly with the validation tool.

At the top of the page, the camera square shows your device’s current camera view. The rear camera is usually selected by default. If your device has more than one camera, click to cycle through the available video inputs.

Below the camera square, use the search bar to find tickets by ticket number, booking reference, or customer data.

Below the search bar are these additional actions:

Share access — quickly give ticket-validation access to people outside your team.
Download data — download ticket data for offline preparation.
Test — run a demonstration scan.

The main panel below these actions displays ticket information after you scan or find a ticket.

Scan tickets and validate seats

Point the camera or connected barcode scanner at the ticket’s QR code. When the code is detected, its information appears in the main ticket-information area.

Tip: If the QR code is difficult to detect, ask the attendee to set their phone brightness to 100%. For paper tickets, make sure there is enough light; a flashlight can help in darker premises.

The result has three sections.

Event card and progress bar

The event card shows the poster, date, time, and location. Its orange progress bar represents utilized capacity.

A blue line progresses across the top of the orange bar as guests check in. It shows the total number of validated seats across the whole event, including all doors.

Ticket number and seat information

A panel before the event card shows the ticket number, the number of seats, and Validate. The way seats appear depends on whether the event uses custom ticket types or a seating chart.

If a ticket is fully or partially validated, you also see the name of the team member who validated it.

Events with custom ticket types

You see the ticket type and a seats input that you can increase or decrease. Online orders are usually issued as tickets grouped by sector, so use this input to choose how many seats in that ticket to validate.

For example, if a ticket covers a group but only some people have arrived, validate only the number present. When the rest of the group arrives with the same ticket, validate their seats then. You cannot validate more seats than the ticket contains.

Events with a seating chart

You see a list of individual seats, including their sector, row, seat, or region. Each seat has a checkbox. When you click Validate, only the selected seats are checked in. Leave other seats unselected if you expect more people from the group to arrive later.

For a ticket for a capacity-based region in a hybrid seating chart, a numeric seats input appears instead of checkboxes, and you validate it like a custom ticket type because the buyer chose a quantity for the region rather than individual seats.

If the same booking includes more than one ticket related to the ticket you are viewing, Find related tickets appears. Click it to replace the button with a section listing all related tickets in that booking.

Expand a ticket in this list to validate its seats in the same way.

Continue with the next ticket

After you scan a ticket, the camera stream pauses and displays Tap or click to resume. This prevents the camera or barcode scanner from capturing another ticket while you inspect the current one.

After you validate the ticket, the camera stream resumes automatically. To skip validation and continue to the next ticket, tap or click the camera box to resume the stream manually.

Find a ticket manually

If a ticket has no barcode or cannot be scanned, use the search bar to find its booking or ticket. Search using any of the following:

Ticket code
Booking code
Customer’s first name, last name, or both
Customer’s full or partial phone number
Customer’s full or partial email address

When you find the booking or ticket, tap or click its result to load it.

Tip: Phone numbers are recorded at checkout with a country code (+...). When searching by phone, enter the number without the leading 0 for more accurate results.

Logged-in team members can validate tickets. You can also assign designated door staff the Usher role, which gives them ticket-validation access to all your events without other permissions.

You can quickly share a ticket-validation link with people outside your Entase organization profile, such as security guards or hostesses.

Click Share access. A box with your upcoming events appears.
Select the access period: 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours from now.
Select one or more events for which to grant validation access.
Click Next at the bottom of the window.
A new box displays a generated QR code.

Share the access link in either way:

Let the other person scan the QR code with their mobile device. This immediately opens ticket validation.
Tap or click the QR code to copy the access link to your clipboard, then share it by email, chat message, or another method.

The link stops working when the selected access period expires.

Download ticket data

If connectivity may be poor, download ticket data to your phone before the event.

Click Download data. A box with your upcoming events appears.
Select one or more events whose data you want to download.
Click Next at the bottom of the window.

The data is usually downloaded within a few seconds to one minute, depending on the number of issued tickets and your connection speed.

Keep these limitations in mind:

If a ticket is not in the local database, the tool still attempts to look it up online. With no connection at all, validation fails.
Validations attempt to sync in the background. With no connection at all, check-in progress does not work and validations are out of sync.

Run a test scan

Use Test to give ushers a quick demonstration of the validation process, particularly if they are using the Entase validation tool for the first time.

Click Test to display two test tickets with partial validations.