Ticketing for Independent Music Venues

The vertical decides the vocabulary, the questions asked at checkout, the inventory model, the door, the payout terms and the theme. This page says "ticket" and "show" because that is what a venue says; a config whose primary call to action is generic ticketing wording fails validation rather than shipping.

Who this is not for. Excludes venues under exclusive national ticketing contracts. If that is closer to your operation, the vertical you want is probably a different one — all twenty are listed here.

A different headliner, a different deal, every night of the week

A venue programme is not one business repeated. Tuesday is a local promoter taking the room on a hire, Thursday is a touring act on a percentage, Saturday is your own night and the money is all yours. The terms are agreed by email weeks earlier and then held in one person's head. Settlement happens after the room is cleared, from an exported spreadsheet, at one in the morning, on a phone calculator — and the figure you hand the tour manager has to still be right in daylight.

What bindro does: The shares live on the show instead of in your head. A house default covers the nights that are entirely yours, and any individual show can carry its own set that replaces that default wholesale rather than merging with it. Shares are basis points that must total exactly 100%, they are frozen onto the payout at the moment it is scheduled so that editing the table next week cannot move money that has already settled, and the leftover cents are allocated to the largest fractional claim rather than each share being rounded on its own — which is what makes the parts add up to the whole instead of to a penny less.

Half the room decides at eight o'clock whether it is coming

Advance sales for a small room routinely stop somewhere short of the capacity and the rest of the audience turns up on the night with a card in their hand. Run that door on a separate reader and a printed list and you have two sets of figures for one show: the platform believes it sold a hundred and twenty, the float disagrees, and by the time anyone reconciles them nobody can say what the room actually held at half past nine.

What bindro does: The walk-up till sells from the same inventory as the listing page. A door sale draws on the show's capacity pool exactly as an online sale does and under the same row lock, so the last ticket in the room cannot go twice — once to somebody refreshing the page on the bus and once to somebody standing in front of you. The day-of screen carries remaining capacity live while the doors are open, and the night arrives as one set of numbers rather than two that have to be married up afterwards.

The room is under the pavement and the signal stops at the top of the stairs

A great many of these rooms are underneath something. The door is the one place in the building where a spinning progress wheel costs you the show: a queue along the street, somebody holding a phone above their head hunting for a bar of reception, and eventually a decision to wave people through on trust because the alternative is two hundred people on the pavement at twenty past eight.

What bindro does: The door list is pulled onto the device before the doors open and the scanner works against what is already there. A code is checked locally, so a scan is instant with no coverage whatsoever, and the records reconcile themselves when the phone finds a network again. A second scan of a code that has already admitted is still caught and still says so, and a name can be found and admitted by hand when a screen has died in the rain or a code will not read.

A show sells out on Friday and is on a resale site by Saturday

The tickets go in eleven minutes and reappear at four times the price. Some of what reappears is real and merely expensive; some of it is a screenshot of one QR code sold to three different people, and all three of them find out on the door, in front of your staff, about a band they travelled for. Whatever the marketplace took, the argument is yours.

What bindro does: A handover is named rather than anonymous. When the buyer passes a ticket on, the credential is rewritten in a single transaction: the old code stops admitting on both the online scan and the offline door list, the new holder is sent the code that now works, and the previous holder is told it has moved and is not sent the replacement. No inventory moves and no money moves — the order and the right to a refund stay with whoever actually paid, so "transfer it to me" is never a way to take somebody else's money back.

It is an eighteen-plus show and the door has to be able to prove it

The licence is the business. A door that lets in somebody underage is not a bad evening, it is a review of the premises licence, and the person on the door at the time is usually the newest member of staff working their third shift. Generic ticketing has nothing to say about any of this: it sells a ticket to anyone with a card and leaves the entire policy to be remembered, out loud, in the dark.

What bindro does: The age rule is part of the show rather than a line in the description. The configuration for this vertical asks for the booker's date of birth and a confirmation of the age limit at checkout, refuses the registration at validation if it does not hold, and carries the alcohol age check as a compliance obligation that is collected before payment instead of chased afterwards. The door sees the policy on the scan rather than having to know it, and identity checks are recorded against the booking rather than in somebody's memory of the queue.

Every ticket sells at one price, including the last thirty

The first hundred would have gone at any price and the last thirty need help. One flat price for a whole on-sale leaves money on the table at the start and an unsold corner of the room at the end. The usual workaround — publish a cheap ticket, then remember to hide it on a Tuesday — depends on somebody being awake at the right moment, and the moment is normally the one week nobody is.

What bindro does: Tiers carry their own selling windows and the engine enforces them. An early release opens and closes on its own schedule, the next tier takes over without anyone logging in, and a tier that has ended is refused at checkout rather than hidden in the page — which is the difference between a price ladder and a rendering trick that a bookmarked URL walks straight through. Promotional codes sit alongside for the mailing list and the support act, with their own limits.

Tiers that open and close without anybody logging in

Advance, early release and a walk-up price are separate tiers on the same show, each with a window the checkout honours. The room is one capacity pool underneath them, so a tier is a price and a period rather than a private allocation nobody can see the bottom of.

• Four pricing shapes are sellable in this vertical: flat, tiered, early bird and a pass across a run of nights.
• A closed tier is refused at the point of sale, not hidden in the markup.
• Holding a block back for the guest list is a comp allocation, which does not pretend to be a sale.

Artist splits, to the cent — and the exact line where they stop

Set the shares as a house default or against one show and the platform cuts that show's net by them, names every party on the money screen and freezes the table onto the payout when it schedules. What it does not do is send anyone their money: it holds no bank details but yours, so a split show settles to nobody and says so rather than reporting a transfer that never happened.

• Shares are basis points totalling exactly 100%, checked in the database rather than in the form.
• A show's own table replaces the house default wholesale, because the headliner changes and the deal changes with it.
• A refund shrinks the night and the shares are re-cut at the frozen ratio, so nobody is paid out of a sale that was undone.
• You still make the payment to the artist; what you no longer do is work out what it should be.

A walk-up till that is the phone already in your pocket

The door sale charges a card on the operator's own device and lands in the same pool, the same order table and the same night's report as everything sold online. Bar and merchandise sales can be recorded through the same till so the night's numbers are complete, with one important difference explained below.

An offline door, and a login that only opens the door

Scanning works from a list held on the device, so it is instant with no signal and reconciles when there is one. The person working it signs in with a role that shows a name and whether the code admits — not what anyone paid, not the night's takings, not the rest of the programme. That is enforced in the handler, not by leaving a button off a screen.

Named transfer instead of a resale marketplace

A punter who cannot come hands the ticket to somebody by name and the old code dies the moment the new one is issued. It is deliberately narrower than a marketplace: it kills the screenshot sold three times, and it does nothing at all about a private sale at four times face value, because there is no listing page and no price cap here to enforce one.

The age policy, asked at checkout and honoured at the door

Date of birth, an age confirmation and an accessibility question come preconfigured on the booking form for this vertical, and the alcohol age check is carried as a compliance obligation rather than as a sentence in your event description. A registration that fails the rule is refused with every problem listed at once, so a punter fixes one form instead of one field at a time.

Guest list, comps and orders you put in by hand

Comp tickets consume capacity and scan on the door like any other, and write no revenue at all — so the guest list never inflates what the night made and never reaches an artist's share as if it had been sold. An order can also be entered from the back office for the phone call you took, and promotional codes cover the mailing list and the support act's friends.

• A comp is separated from revenue in every report rather than counted at zero.
• Back-office orders go through the same money path as the website, because a second path is a second place for a money bug to live.

Merch bought with a ticket and merch bought at the table settle differently

This is the thing a venue is most likely to get wrong, so it is stated rather than discovered. A shirt added to the basket at checkout is platform money: it goes through the ledger, appears in the payout and sits inside the artist's split. A sale rung through the merchandise or bar till is a record for your own numbers only — that money stays with you, never enters the platform ledger and never reaches a split.

A pass for a residency or a run of nights

A pass across a series is a sellable shape here: one purchase admitting its holder to each night in the run. Structure the run as separate shows with a pass over the top rather than as one show with a dozen dates, for a cash-flow reason that has its own section further down this page.

Your listing page, or the site you already have

Every show gets a hosted page that works with scripting switched off, and the same checkout embeds into your own site if the programme already lives there. There is no white-label domain and no generated share image for a venue — a listing is shared as an ordinary link, which is worth knowing before you plan around it.

Refunds, chargebacks and sales tax, in an order that cannot surprise you

A refund reverses in a fixed sequence — your proceeds first, then tax, then the platform fee — so a refunded ticket never leaves you charged for a sale that was undone. A chargeback debits the venue in full and is recorded as itself rather than netted quietly against the next show. Sales tax, where it applies, is held as a liability rather than mixed into your balance.

• The fee can be added to what the punter pays, absorbed by the venue, or split; the rate does not change with the choice, only which side of the sale it leaves.
• Tax can be added on top of the price or carved out of a tax-inclusive one, per show. Bindro registers nobody for VAT, issues no VAT invoice and files no return — that is your accountant's work, not the platform's.

Who came, who did not, and who to tell about the next one

Tickets sold against punters actually scanned gives you a no-show rate per night, which for a small room is the difference between a genre that sells and a genre that merely books. The people who came are yours: a follow-up after the show, a record of who has been before, and a full export whenever you want it, behind a one-time code, with no export fee and nothing to cancel.

Who pays the booking fee?

The punter, unless you say otherwise. Every show carries its own setting — the punter pays, you absorb it, or you split it — and the fee itself does not change with the choice, only which side of the sale it comes from. On a ten-ticket $25.00 show that is $16.20 either added to what punters pay or taken out of what you keep.

Because the default is the punter, a venue can go from signing up to a sold-out show without paying bindro anything up front, at any point, ever. We are paid out of sales that happened or we are not paid.

The word "event" is load-bearing and worth reading twice. The scheduler groups by show, admits one only once its LAST session has ended, and pays it once. A show sold as a run of dates therefore pays after the final date, not after each one — a season's float is not something an operator should discover halfway through the season.

Bindro never pays before delivery, in any vertical. A pre-event advance is a configuration violation platform-wide rather than a policy someone can be talked out of, because paying out on shows that have not happened is exactly how a cancellation becomes punters with no refund. "Paid" also means the money moved: a payout only reaches its paid state with a real transfer reference attached, enforced by the database rather than by a status field someone can set.

• One payout per show, after its last session ends, one in flight at a time.
• T+2 for this vertical (medium risk tier), with 9% held as reserve and released later.
• Refunds reverse in a fixed order — your proceeds first, then tax, then our fee — so a refund never leaves you charged for a sale that was undone.
• Sales tax, where it applies, is held as a liability rather than mixed into your balance, so the payout figure is proceeds rather than a number you still have to do subtraction on.

The worked example this vertical is written around: 170 tickets at $18.00 in a 200-capacity room is $3,060.00 through the door, $244.80 of platform fees on top of it, $2,815.20 net. The 9% reserve this risk tier carries holds $253.37 of that back and returns it after ninety days, so $2,561.83 is the number the shares actually divide. A 70/20/10 table across a headliner, a support act and the house is applied to that figure and to nothing else — not to gross, which is the mistake that turns a good night into an argument.

The three measures beside the headline are the ones this trade is actually run on: how the night split between advance and the door, what the no-show rate was, and what the bar took per head. The first two come straight out of the platform. The third depends on whether you ring the bar through the till, and it is worth being plain that a bar sale recorded here is a record for your own numbers rather than money the platform ever holds.

The segments are the ones a programmer thinks in — genre, night of the week, advance against door, and whether there was a support act — because they are declared in this vertical's configuration rather than chosen by a reporting tool that has no idea what a support act is. That is also why the funnel stops where it does: a view, a checkout, a payment, a scan, and then what was spent at the bar.

What the console shows today, without an integration or a spreadsheet:

• Gross, platform fees and refunds per show, read from the ledger the payouts reconcile against.
• Tickets sold against punters checked in, with a no-show percentage per session.
• Live remaining capacity while the show is running, per pool, on the day-of screen.
• This venue's own funnel — view → checkout → paid → scanned → bar spend — stage by stage with the drop-off between them, and any step the platform cannot see said so rather than shown as a zero.
• Refunds, transfers, turnout, no-shows, add-on attach and repeat buyers, each printed with the two numbers it was divided from.
• Orders and punters as CSV, so anything not on the screen is one export away.

Two more that are worth stating plainly. Sensitive answers are classified on the field rather than by convention, and health data is excluded from analytics exports and from AI context absolutely, with no override in any vertical. And a venue's own people see only what their role allows — a door login sees a name and whether the code admits, not what anyone paid — which is checked in the handler rather than by hiding a button.

• Sending an artist their share directly — bindro works out each party's cut to the cent, freezes it onto the show's payout, shows it by name on your money screen and gives each party a link to their own settlement, but it holds no bank details for anyone except you. A split show therefore settles to nobody until that changes, and the console says so rather than reporting a transfer that did not happen. You still pay the artist yourself; what you no longer do is work out what they are owed.
• Deal clauses that pick between two shapes — a guarantee off the top, the show's own costs recovered by whoever paid them, and each party's percentage of what is left are all modelled. A "greater of the guarantee or the door split" clause and a breakpoint are not: the settlement cuts one shape, not whichever turns out larger on the night.
• Reserved seating — seat maps are configured as optional for music venues and are not resolved, so a seated show sells from a capacity pool like any other. There are no seat numbers, no seating plan and no seat picker.
• A waitlist when a show sells out — that capability is not declared for this vertical, so the sold-out page carries no join form and a sold-out show is simply sold out.
• A resale marketplace — it is not built, and the configuration says so in as many words. A punter who cannot come hands the ticket on by name; there is no listing page, no face-value exchange and no price cap to enforce.
• Cash taken at the door — the walk-up till charges a card on the operator's device. Cash ticket sales are deliberately not recorded, because crediting the platform for money it never held would pay you for the same ticket twice at payout.
• Bar and merch till takings as platform money — a till sale is recorded so the night's numbers are complete, but the money stays with you and never enters the platform ledger, a payout or an artist's split. Merchandise pre-ordered with a ticket at checkout is the opposite: that is platform money and it is inside the split.
• Wristbands, gift cards and venue subscriptions — all three are configured as optional for music venues and none is resolved, so each is a clean refusal rather than a half-working feature. Entry is by QR code.
• A share card or link-in-bio page for a show — the shareable landing page and generated social image are declared for club promoters and not for venues, so a listing is shared as an ordinary link. You can embed the ticket page in your own site, which is a core capability.
• Running your room outside the United States — host onboarding offers one country today. A show can now be priced tax-inclusive, so the ticket price you publish is the price paid; bindro still registers nobody for VAT, issues no VAT invoice and files no return.

If one of those is the thing you need, say so — the answer is a capability declared, built and gated properly, or a straight no. It is never a feature flag that collects the request and does nothing.

The rule behind it is not negotiable and is not about you: nothing on this platform pays an organiser before delivery, in any vertical, because paying out on nights that have not happened yet is precisely how a cancelled run becomes two hundred punters with no refund available. A pre-event advance is a configuration violation platform-wide rather than a policy that can be argued down.

So the shape of your listing is a cash-flow decision, and it is one you make once. One show per night releases each night on its own two days after that night ends. A pass across the run is sold on top of the individual nights rather than instead of them, which keeps the release schedule nightly while still giving the audience a single purchase for the series.

The other half of the schedule is the reserve. This vertical sits in the medium risk tier, so 9% of the net is withheld at release and returned after ninety days. The figure comes from the expected cancellation rate for music venues rather than from anything about your room, and it exists because the platform carries the refund and chargeback risk on a show pulled after the money has already gone out.

The arithmetic is genuinely built and genuinely deep — basis points that must total exactly 100%, a show-level table overriding the house default, allocation of the remainder to the largest fractional claim, the table frozen at scheduling, the shares re-cut at that frozen ratio when a refund shrinks the night, each of those enforced by the database rather than by the form that collects them. What is missing is the rail underneath it: nothing in the product ever writes a destination for a party other than the venue itself.

The consequence is stated rather than softened, because a venue that believed otherwise would stop settling with its artists and find out three weeks later. You get the calculation, the record and a screen you can turn around and show a tour manager. You still send the money.

It is worth saying what a share is here as well. A share is a fixed percentage of the net of that show's ticket sales. A guarantee, a "greater of the guarantee or the door split" clause, a breakpoint, or a deduction for backline, sound, hospitality or the door person is not modelled anywhere in the engine — if your deals routinely take that shape, the calculation here will be a starting point rather than an answer.

A refund reverses your proceeds first, then the tax, then the platform fee. That order is the reason a cancelled show does not quietly leave the venue carrying a fee on a ticket that was handed back. Refunds are idempotent on the provider's own reference, so a retried request returns the original refund rather than issuing a second one.

If a punter goes to their bank instead, the chargeback is recorded as a chargeback and debits the venue in full, rather than being folded into some other line where it stops being visible. This is the risk the reserve exists to cover, and it is why the reserve is a published percentage of a published tier rather than a number somebody at the platform decides about your room.

The practical advice for a small room: cancel the show in the console rather than only on social media. The cancellation is what stops the door list admitting, stops further sales against the pool and starts the refunds; a post that says the night is off does none of those things, and the tickets stay live and transferable until something in the system says otherwise.

A seated show sells from a capacity pool like any other night: a number of tickets and no seat numbers, no seating plan and no seat picker. If your room is all seated and the seat number is the product, this is the wrong platform today and that is better learned on this page than after a migration.

When a show sells out, it is simply sold out — the page carries no join form, and nobody is holding a list you could work through when a return comes back. The honest counterpart is the named transfer described above, which helps the two people involved in a handover and nobody else.

The cash refusal is the one that surprises people, because walk-up cash is normal in a small room. The walk-up till charges a card on the operator's device; a cash ticket sale is not recorded, because crediting the platform for money it never held would pay the venue twice — once in the cashbox on the night and once again when the money for that show is released. Take cash by all means; it stays outside these numbers, which also means it stays outside the split unless you put it there yourself.

Do it in this order. Join with a phone number and name the venue; there are no identity checks at this stage and no card is taken. Build the show with an advance tier and a walk-up tier, set the capacity to the real licensed number, and publish. Send the link. On the night, sign the door staff in with a door role, download the list before the doors open and scan from it.

Connect a bank account before the show rather than after it. That is the point the identity checks happen, it is the only thing standing between a finished show and its release, and a venue that leaves it until the Monday afterwards has invented a delay the platform did not ask for.

Then read the two guides that cover the parts most likely to bite: the one on settling a show with the artist, which walks the split arithmetic through a real night, and the one on working a door with no signal, which is written for the person holding the phone rather than for the person who bought the software.