Craft Workshop Booking & Gift Vouchers

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

The wheel has eight stools and the booking form is selling "Saturday"

A studio day is not one class, it is a ten o'clock, a two o'clock and sometimes a six. A form that sells "a pottery class" with no time attached sells all three into whichever one the buyer imagines, and the correction happens by email on Friday night. Meanwhile the real limit is physical and small — the number of wheels, the number of benches, how many people one tutor can actually watch near a kiln — and it lives in the head of whoever is teaching. Two people take the last stool within a minute of each other perhaps twice a year, and each time somebody is refunded, apologised to and lost.

What bindro does: The day is inventory rather than an opening period. Every session carries its own stock of places, and that count moves only under a row lock inside the transaction that confirms the booking, with a database constraint behind it as a backstop rather than as the mechanism — so the last stool at ten o'clock cannot be sold twice, however close together the two cards are entered. A session that fills stops selling itself and says "Fully booked", which is the label this configuration chose rather than a generic badge, and the remaining count per session is live on the day-of screen while you are teaching.

The waiver is a clipboard by the door, signed by whoever still has clean hands

Kilns, blades, hot wax and a room of adults who have never held the tool before are the ordinary conditions of this trade, and the paperwork that covers them is usually collected at the last possible moment: a clipboard passed round while the tutor is talking, signed by six of eight people, filed in a drawer. Two things go wrong with that. Somebody who declines to sign has already handed over their money, which makes the refusal a refund argument instead of a booking that never happened; and when an insurer asks what a maker actually agreed to eighteen months ago, the answer is a signature on a page whose wording nobody kept.

What bindro does: The waiver is part of checkout, not part of the door. A maker types their name, the acceptance is written inside the same transaction that takes the card, and a booking arriving without it is refused rather than flagged — there is no path through the money that leaves the signature for later. What is stored is the typed name, the exact wording that was on screen and a digest of it, kept for the 36 months this vertical's compliance rule sets, so the question is answerable years afterwards. Two things belong in the same breath: one signature covers the whole order however many places it holds, and no age rule applies to a date until you set one on it under "Who this date suits", where a lowest and a highest age are refused on the form rather than after the card is taken.

Christmas is a shoebox of handwritten vouchers and a phone that rings in January

A large share of workshop places are bought by somebody who will never attend one. The usual instrument is a card written by hand in December, and its whole lifecycle is unrecorded: nobody knows how many are outstanding, what they were sold for, whether the one being waved at the counter in March was already used, or what to do when the price of a class has moved since. The money is spent long before the class is taught, which feels like a good December and is really a liability with no ledger, and the reconciliation lands on whoever opens the studio in January.

What bindro does: A gift card is a real balance against your studio, sold between $5 and $500, valid for 24 months and spendable at checkout against anything you have on sale. The code is emailed to the recipient as soon as it is bought, so nothing has to be printed or posted, and the money is carried as a liability until it is redeemed rather than booked as takings — you and the platform both earn nothing on it until a place is actually taken. The honest limit is the shape: this is a sum of money, not a voucher for a named class, and it cannot be restricted to one workshop or carry a printed message.

The term course is six separate transactions, and the credits live on a card in a tin

Studios sell in blocks because that is how a skill is taught: six Tuesdays on the wheel, or a punch card of five sessions to be used whenever. Both are usually run as paperwork. The block becomes six bookings that have to be kept together by hand, and the punch card becomes a spreadsheet — or a literal tin — recording who has how many left, which nobody trusts by March. The awkward case is the one that actually comes up: somebody with two sessions left wants the masterclass that costs more, and the answer is invented at the counter, differently each time.

What bindro does: A class pack is prepaid credit sold as its own product and spent at checkout. A credit buys one place, and the arithmetic around it is fixed rather than negotiated: a dearer class takes a credit plus the difference on the card, and a class cheaper than a credit punches nothing at all and is bought outright. The balance belongs to the maker, is visible to them and cannot be spent as loose change on add-ons. A term that genuinely is one course with six dates is the other shape — publish it as a series, sell one place across the run, and the payout follows the last date rather than the first.

The kit, the clay and the firing fee are collected in cash on the day

Almost nothing in this trade is only the class. There is a take-home kit, a bag of clay, a glaze charge, a firing fee that is not payable until weeks after the session, and a card machine on the shelf for whoever remembers to ask. The extras end the day in an envelope, the sales tax on them is worked out at the end of the quarter by somebody who was not in the room, and the question the studio most wants answered — what an hour at the wheel is actually worth once materials are counted — has no answer, because half the takings never met the other half.

What bindro does: Kits, clay and firing fees are published as add-ons against the workshop, each with its own stock, and a maker picks them during the same checkout that takes the place. They are priced, taxed and stock-moved inside the confirming transaction, so an add-on that has run out cannot be oversold and a later refund reverses it on the same path as the place itself. Sales tax is derived on the server in the single derivation the quote and the charge share, and it is itemised on the summary instead of buried in a total. Somebody walking in on the day is sold to through the ordinary checkout, card only — this vertical has no till and cannot record cash.

Eight people book under one name and arrive as eight strangers

Hen parties, team days and birthday groups are the profitable end of a studio diary and the hardest to run, because one person pays for everybody and knows only some of their names. On the morning the tutor has a number rather than a list, no idea who has done this before, and a set of signatures collected from whoever happened to be standing nearest the clipboard. Late drop-outs from a group are worse still: the organiser assumes the empty places can be given to friends, and finds out at the door that nobody wrote down who was coming instead.

What bindro does: A group booking creates a roster on the order, and a place left unnamed is refused at the door rather than admitted on trust — so the list you teach from is the list that was paid for. The registration form already asks the things this trade needs, including whether the maker has done it before, and a discount code or a comped place can sit alongside the booking for a corporate rate or a workshop given away to a local charity. A group that wants the room to itself is one action rather than a conversation: "Hire this date out" on that date sells every remaining place to them in one order, so nothing is left for the public and the tutor teaches one party. Say the awkward half plainly: a group member who drops out cannot hand their place to a friend, because this vertical resolves no transfer.

Timed sessions that hold their own places and close themselves

This is the shape of the vertical and the rest hangs off it. You publish a workshop, give it the sessions you actually teach, and give each session its own stock of places — which can differ by price band, so six wheel places and four hand-building places at the same hour is ordinary configuration rather than a workaround. Bands open and close on the dates you set, whether or not anyone is watching the console that evening.

• Places are held under a row lock while a maker pays, and released again if they walk away from the page.
• Each price band is its own ticket type with its own price, stock and on-sale window — an early-bird term rate is two bands, not a discount code.
• A full session shows "Fully booked" and stops selling without anyone touching it.
• Remaining places per session are live on the day-of screen, so the tutor sees what the website sees.
• The booking form already asks phone, dietary needs, access needs, prior experience and the signature.

A liability waiver signed on the money path, not on a clipboard

The signature is a condition of the sale rather than a step after it. A maker types their name, the acceptance row is written in the transaction that confirms the order, and a missing one refuses the booking outright. The record keeps the wording shown on screen and a digest of it, which is the part that matters when it is read back long after the class.

• Retention is 36 months for this vertical, set by its compliance rule rather than by a default.
• The stored wording is the wording that was on screen, so a later edit cannot rewrite what somebody agreed to.
• One signature covers the whole order: a booking of four places carries one signer, not four.
• An age limit belongs to the date, not to the vertical: set a lowest age under "Who this date suits" and an under-age booking is refused on the form, before payment.
• Dietary and access answers come back where you work: under each maker's name on the register, on that date's allergen sheet, and in the maker CSV — and never on an analytics screen or in the assistant.

Prepaid money that stays prepaid until somebody takes a place

Gift cards and class packs are the two instruments this trade runs on, and both are balances rather than bookings. Neither is treated as revenue on the day it is sold: the money sits as a liability and becomes takings when a place is taken against it, which is also the point the platform first earns anything on it.

• Gift cards are sold from $5 to $500, valid 24 months, and the code is emailed to the recipient rather than to the buyer.
• A gift card spends against anything your studio has on sale, and cannot be tied to one workshop.
• Class-pack credits are studio-wide: there is no pack that covers the wheel course and excludes the masterclass.
• A credit buys one place; a dearer class takes the credit plus the difference, and a cheaper one is bought outright.
• Neither instrument can be topped up, extended or partially refunded once it is sold.

Materials charged with the place, and a walk-up that is a real card sale

Add-ons are part of the order rather than a second system: the kit is charged by bindro, taxed with the place, stock-moved inside the confirming transaction and refunded through the same path. A person who walks in on the day is handed into that same checkout with a genuine hold on the place, which is deliberate — there is no second money path at the door for a sale to go missing down.

• Add-on stock cannot be oversold, because it moves under the same lock as the place it was bought with.
• One tax rate is set on the workshop and itemised on the checkout summary rather than folded into the total.
• A refund reverses in a fixed order — your proceeds, then the tax, then the platform fee.
• A door sale derives its price the same way, takes the same signature and issues a code that scans.
• Cash cannot be recorded: crediting you for money the platform never held would pay you twice for one place.

Groups, a waiting list and the door on workshop day

Workshop day is a name list, not a turnstile, and the console is built for that: search a name, admit, watch the number come down. Groups arrive as one order with a roster attached. The waiting list is real and worth understanding precisely, because what wakes it is narrower than most studios assume.

• The queue promotes only while a session has room — it fires when an abandoned checkout hold lapses, never when somebody cancels.
• To reopen a place after a refund, raise that session's capacity by one; the queue then promotes in order.
• Check-in works by name or by code, and a place admits once — a second scan reads as a duplicate.
• The door needs a connection: this vertical does not resolve offline check-in, so plan for signal in the studio.
• Staff roles are enforced in the handler, so somebody on the door sees a name and whether the code admits, not what anyone paid.

Your own booking page, or checkout inside the site you already have

Most studios already have a site they like, usually built around photographs of the work. You do not have to move it. Every workshop gets a hosted page that is fast and reads in this vertical's own words, and the same checkout embeds into your existing pages so a maker never leaves your domain to book.

• The hosted page carries the workshop's own structured data, so it can be found on its own rather than only through your homepage.
• The embed is the same checkout, with the same inventory locks and the same waiver.
• Orders and makers export as CSV at any time, behind a fresh one-time code — no export fee and no notice period.
• A follow-up email can go to everyone who attended, which is the mechanism behind a repeat booking.
• A reminder can go out before the workshop — one email per booking, a set number of hours ahead — but it is per workshop and off until you tick it on.

Who pays the booking fee?

The maker, unless you say otherwise. Every workshop carries its own setting — the maker 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-place $25.00 workshop that is $16.20 either added to what makers pay or taken out of what you keep.

Because the default is the maker, a studio can go from signing up to a sold-out workshop 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 workshop, admits one only once its LAST session has ended, and pays it once. A workshop 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 workshops that have not happened is exactly how a cancellation becomes makers 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 workshop, after its last session ends, one in flight at a time.
• T+2 for this vertical (low risk tier), no reserve.
• 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 three figures this vertical is built to watch are the no-show rate, the gift-card redemption rate and the repeat maker rate. The first is directly visible: the console shows places sold against makers checked in, per session, with a percentage. It is worth reading with the platform's refund policy in mind, because a maker can refund themselves in full up to the moment the session starts, so a late cancellation shows as a refund rather than as a no-show and the two have to be added together to get the number a studio actually feels.

The other two are a division away rather than a dashboard tile. Gift-card redemption is the balance you have sold against the orders that later spent one, and repeat makers are found by taking the same email across two exports — both come out of the orders and makers CSV, which is why the export is unrestricted and needs nothing but a fresh one-time code. The segments the configuration is shaped around are the ones that change how a studio sells: gift against self, prior experience, and weekday against weekend.

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

• Gross, platform fees and refunds per workshop, read from the ledger the payouts reconcile against.
• Places sold against makers checked in, with a no-show percentage per session.
• Live remaining capacity while the workshop is running, per pool, on the day-of screen.
• This studio's own funnel — view → date selected → checkout → paid → attended → rebooked — 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 makers 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 studio'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.

• A refunded place does not go back on sale, and the waiting list never sees it. Refunding a booking returns the money and leaves the place counted as sold, so the session still reads fully booked and the queue stays asleep — it wakes only when an abandoned checkout hold lapses, or when the maker cancels under published terms that keep a share, which does end the booking and does free the place. After a plain refund: raise that session's capacity by one by hand.
• No-show protection goes exactly as far as your published terms. You can set the hours before the session at which self-service refunds stop, and the share you keep on a cancellation inside that window — bindro applies both itself, ends the booking and returns the rest. What you cannot do is take a deposit, hold a card against a no-show, or charge anybody who simply does not arrive. The reminder email exists but is off until you turn it on, one workshop at a time: tick "Send a reminder for this workshop" on that workshop's Reminders page and every booking on it is emailed once, a set number of hours before it starts (24 is the lead we suggest for an evening class). Nothing is sent for a workshop where nobody has ticked it.
• No transfers and no date changes. A maker who cannot come on Saturday cannot hand their place to a friend and cannot move it to next week — this vertical resolves neither ticket transfer nor deferral, and there is no credit note. The only lever is a refund, after which they book again at whatever is still on sale.
• A gift card is a balance, not a voucher for a named workshop: $5 to $500, valid 24 months, spendable on anything your studio has on sale. You cannot sell "one place at the Saturday wheel class" as a gift or restrict a card to one class, and there is no send date and nothing printable — the code is emailed to the recipient, with the name and the message you typed, as soon as it is paid for, so a card bought on 3 December lands on 3 December.
• Class-pack credits are studio-wide and cannot be aimed at one class. There is no pack that covers the six-week wheel course and nothing else, and no way to exclude a masterclass. A credit buys one place: a dearer class takes a credit plus the difference in cash, and a class cheaper than a credit punches nothing at all and is paid in full.
• Nothing counts an answer for you. What a maker told you is readable in three places — the register, stacked under their name, for anyone you have given the grant to read makers; that date's allergen sheet, maker by maker, for the dietary answers only, behind a fresh verification and an audit line; and the maker CSV, which carries a column for every question you asked, access needs and "Have you done this before?" included — but nothing totals them. No analytics screen breaks a date down by what people answered, and a dietary or access answer is kept out of the assistant absolutely and leaves bindro in the maker CSV alone: not in answers.csv, not in contacts.csv, not in the one-file JSON archive. Counting how many beginners are booked on Saturday is reading, not a report.
• One signature covers the whole booking, not each maker on it. The waiver is typed by the person paying, and the acceptance record names that one signer however many places the order covers. There is also no age rule until you write one: the vertical sets no minimum, so a booking for a fifteen-year-old at a woodworking bench is refused only on a date where you have set a lowest age under "Who this date suits" — and what that checks is a date of birth typed on the form, refused before payment but not proof of anybody's age.
• No shop till and no cash. A walk-up place sold at the door is a real card sale on the ordinary checkout, but there is no way to record a place paid for in cash and no counter-sales page for mugs, glazes or fired pieces. Kits and firing fees can be sold as add-ons ON a booking; anything sold separately at your counter stays outside bindro.

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 first is the one to plan a habit around. Refunding returns the money and leaves the place counted as sold, so the session still reads full and the waiting list stays asleep. The workaround is one action rather than a support ticket: refund the maker, then raise that session's capacity by one, and the queue promotes the next person in order. Studios that run near-full weekends should expect to do that by hand and should not build a policy that assumes it happens by itself.

The second is a habit to replace rather than to keep. Bindro does send a pre-workshop reminder — one email per booking, a set number of hours before the session, 24 being the usual lead for an evening class — but it is switched on one workshop at a time, on that workshop's Reminders page, and nothing goes out for a workshop where nobody has ticked the box. Studios that already send a "what to wear, where to park" note the night before can hand that job over, as long as the box is ticked on each workshop as it is created; the mail carries the session and the time, not your parking directions.

• Refund, then raise capacity by one — that is the sequence that reopens a place after a plain refund and wakes the queue.
• Tick "Send a reminder for this workshop" on each workshop, or nothing is sent for it; the confirmation and the post-workshop follow-up go out either way.
• Tell makers early that a place cannot be handed on or moved, because the refund is the only lever.
• Sell gift cards as studio credit rather than as a named class, because that is what the recipient receives.

A flat price is the ordinary case and needs no explanation. Bands are how an early rate, a concession rate or a two-tier room is built: each band is its own ticket type with its own price, its own stock and its own on-sale dates, so "twelve places at the standard rate, four at the beginner rate, beginner rate closes a week before" is configuration rather than a promotion someone has to remember to end.

Class packs are the third and the one specific to this trade. They are sold as their own product, redeemed at checkout, and deliberately blunt: one credit, one place, with the difference in cash where a class costs more. If what you want is a discount for a party of eight, the honest tool today is a promo code applied to their order, not a group rate — the discount comes off before the platform fee is computed, so it costs you a little less fee as well as a little less revenue.

The distinction worth testing is where the vertical knowledge lives. On a general platform a workshop is an event with a custom question or two, so everything that makes it a workshop — that the signature must exist before the money, that a term is one course rather than six sales, that half the buyers are giving it away — is configuration a studio owner has to hold in their head and rebuild every time. Here it is the configuration the engine runs on, which is also why this page can list what the platform refuses as precisely as what it does.

Read the comparisons with the operational guides beside them. The guide on selling gift vouchers explains what a recipient actually receives in December, the one on a cancelled place walks through the refund-then-capacity sequence, the pricing guide works a class pack through real numbers, and the workshop-day guide covers waivers, groups and the door. Between them they answer more about running the day than any feature list will.