A venue walkthrough

Most help articles in this section cover one feature at a time. This one's different. It walks through using 1pm end-to-end as a venue, from the first lead landing in your inbox to the final payment clearing: leads, quote, confirmation, BEO, run of show, crew, invoicing, and reports. It's the widest of the walkthroughs because a venue runs the whole operation, so treat it as the map and follow the article links for the detail on each stop.

If you're new to 1pm, this article assumes you've signed up and you're looking at the Leads inbox you land on. If you've used the app for a while, treat it as a sample workflow: you'll recognise the individual features from other articles.

The example throughout is a private function room in a hotel taking a 90-pax birthday dinner, but the same workflow runs a ballroom gala, a restaurant's private dining bookings, or a dedicated events space juggling twenty leads a week. Where the job is specifically a wedding or a corporate gala, the wedding-day and corporate-event walkthroughs (articles 32 and 68) go deeper on those; this one is the general venue operation that sits underneath both.

The shape of a venue operation

A venue's work has a shape the others don't: it's a pipeline, not a single job. Leads arrive constantly, most for dates you're trying to fill, and the job is to move each one from lead to confirmed to run to paid without letting any of them fall through. The room is yours and gets reused, so your Spaces are set up once and picked from thereafter. And on the day itself the venue is running the operation, so the BEO (the one-page brief each department works from) is the native document, not an afterthought.

The phases we'll work through:

Capture the lead in the Leads inbox.
Reply, qualify, and quote.
Convert to a confirmed event and take a deposit.
Fill the BEO and pick the Space.
Build the run of show.
Add crew, suppliers, and the client's day-of contact.
Run the event with live links and the crew portal.
Invoice, take payment, and report.

Capture the lead

Put the embeddable lead form on your website (article 97) and leads stop arriving as scattered emails and start landing in one place: the Leads inbox (article 98). Each lead carries the name, email, date, guest count, and message, with a live count badge in the sidebar so you see new ones the moment they arrive. Any custom fields you added to the form (event type, budget, preferred room) come in with it.

The inbox is a pipeline with tabs: New, Qualified, Converted, Lost, Spam. Spam is caught automatically and auto-purges, so you're only ever working real leads. This is the top of your funnel, and keeping it tidy is the difference between a booked calendar and a pile of unanswered emails.

Reply, qualify, and quote

Click a lead to open the two-way email thread and reply from inside 1pm (article 99). Their reply threads straight back in, so the whole conversation lives on the lead, not scattered across your mailbox. Reply templates with merge fields ([first name], [event date], [guests]) mean the "thanks for your lead, here's our function pack" reply is two clicks, not a retype.

Once the lead's real and the date's viable, you have two paths:

Qualify and convert, if they're ready to book on your standard terms. This creates the event directly.
Quote first, if they want numbers. Raise a quote on the lead, send it through the thread as a branded web page, and when they accept it online, the confirmed event is created for you with the pricing already seeded (article 103). An accepted quote is a booked event.

Either way, converting matches or creates the contact and prefills the event with the name, date, and pax you already captured, so nothing gets re-typed (article 100).

Fill the BEO and pick the Space

Open the new event. This is where a venue puts in the detail its departments will work from on the day, the BEO fields (article 57):

Status and Event value. Most bookings sit at Tentative (a hold) and move to Confirmed on signed terms. The value feeds your pipeline totals in the sales reports, so even a rough figure beats blank.
Pax and Pax guaranteed. The expected headcount and the contractual minimum you're charging against. Kitchen preps to guaranteed; the room is laid to expected.
Start time and End time, Access from and Vacate by. The headline times and the load-in window. Access from and Vacate by are the two markers a supplier reads first: when they can start loading in, and when the room must be cleared (article 70).
Service style and Setup style. How the food's delivered and how the room's laid, both free text with autocomplete from your own history. Type "Rounds of 10" once and it's a tap away on every future booking.
Bar package, Dietary Requirements, Menu, and AV. The rest of the departmental brief. Attach a menu from your library and its courses print on the BEO and the client confirmation (article 111). The kitchen reads the dietaries, the bar reads the package, AV reads the tech notes.

Then set the Space. If you've run an event in this room before, the Space picker autocompletes and pulls in the address, access instructions, capacity, and floor plans (article 58). Your rooms are set up once. A hotel with three function rooms is three Spaces in 1pm, one per room, each with its own access notes and floor plan, because that's how your departments actually think about them.

If the booking only uses part of a room, set the Zone (article 20).

Take a deposit and confirm

Send the client a confirmation: the BEO and the pricing on one branded, signable web page (article 109). Set a deposit on it, a percentage or fixed amount with a due date, and 1pm splits the total into deposit and balance and tracks each (article 110). The client signs off online, which locks the confirmation as a record with their name and a timestamp. That signed confirmation is your booking contract, and the event moves to Confirmed.

Build the run of show

Click into the event to open the planner. The run of show is the chronological spine of the night that every department works to.

A typical venue function timeline:

2:00pm Room set, banqueting lay tables.
4:00pm Supplier access, florist and AV load in.
5:30pm Duty manager walkthrough.
6:00pm Doors, guests arrive, bar opens.
6:30pm Guests seated.
6:45pm Entrée service.
7:30pm Speeches, AV cue the slideshow.
7:45pm Main service.
9:00pm Cake, dessert, coffee.
10:00pm Bar last drinks.
11:00pm Carriages, banqueting begin reset.
11:30pm Vacate.

Type it in with the + Insert row or paste a draft from a spreadsheet (article 13). Multiple items at the same start time are fine when departments work in parallel. Put the instruction each department needs in the Details field. Edit any item inline; drag the handle to reorder (article 69).

Add crew, suppliers, and contacts

Open the Crew accordion and add everyone working the event: your banqueting lead, the duty manager, the kitchen pass, bar staff, plus outside suppliers (the florist, the AV crew, the band or DJ, the photographer). Regulars are already in your Contacts with tags, so the picker surfaces them by tag (article 67).

Add the client's day-of contact as a contact and set them as the event's Organizer, so every supplier's link shows whose event they're working. On each timeline item, set the Responsible person: banqueting on the service items, AV on the speeches, the duty manager across the night.

Two extra layers a venue often uses:

Requests (article 22) to collect supplier paperwork before the day, public liability certificates and the like, without chasing emails. Each supplier sees only the requests meant for them.
RSVPs (article 63), if the event is one of your own in-house ticketed nights (a wine tasting, a New Year's dinner, a supper club) where you're collecting attendees rather than working a client's guest list. When RSVPs are on you get a check-in roll and printable name tags (article 64).

Run the event

On the day, sit with the planner open on a tablet at the pass or the duty desk. Each department opens its personal live link and taps Start and Mark finished as it hits each item (article 27). The planner refreshes in real time, so you can see at a glance whether the kitchen's on time and whether the next course is away. The header counts down to the next item and counts up once it's running, so a keynote at plus-eight minutes is your cue to trim the DJ set.

If anything slips, drag the affected items and every supplier's phone updates within seconds (article 81). One source of truth, no chain of "did anyone tell the band?".

Suppliers you use every week should bookmark their crew portal (article 59), the single link that lists every event you've assigned them to. New bookings appear there automatically, so you stop sending per-event links weeks in advance.

For the departments that want paper, print the BEO and run of show straight from the planner (article 53).

Invoice, take payment, and report

The deposit came in at sign-off. Invoice the balance from the event's Billing page: copy the charges to a draft invoice (a frozen snapshot), issue it, and send it as a branded web invoice (article 103). The client pays online by card if you've connected Stripe (article 104), or you record a bank transfer against it. Part-payments track and the invoice marks itself Paid when settled.

Then close the loop with the numbers:

Set the event to Completed so it drops out of the active pipeline but stays on the client's history and the Space's recent events.
The Calendar (article 105) shows your whole book at a glance, colour-coded by status, so you can see what's confirmed and where the gaps are.
The Reports hub (article 106) gives you the venue's operating picture: bookings and pipeline value, revenue invoiced and outstanding, an overdue chase list, and lead conversion rate. Every report exports to CSV and prints clean.

Save what repeats

A venue runs the same shapes of event over and over. Save a fully built event as a template (article 50) and the next birthday dinner, corporate lunch, or standard wedding package is the date, the client, and the value, not a rebuild. Over a few events you'll build a stock of templates, a tag taxonomy on your suppliers, and a set of Requests you reuse, and each new booking gets faster.

Set up automations

A venue handles the same steps on dozens of bookings at once, which is where automations earn their keep. An automation is a rule you set once: a trigger (when it runs) and one or more actions (what it does). Build them under Automations in the sidebar. They start switched off, so nothing sends until you turn one on, and Show upcoming lists the bookings a rule will run for before you do.

A few that suit a venue:

Give each lead type its own sequence. Trigger Lead received, limited to one lead type, so a wedding lead gets your wedding brochure and a corporate lead gets your conference packages.
Know when a quote is being read. Trigger Quote opened with Send account email tells you the moment a client opens it, which is a good time to call.
Chase the stalls. Quote not accepted at 5 days, Accepted, not signed at 2 days and Signed, no payment at 2 days each ask for the one step that is missing (chasing a lead that goes quiet).
Confirm final numbers. Trigger X days before the event at 10 asks the client for final pax and dietaries. A second rule at 3 days uses Email an address to send your kitchen and duty manager inboxes the event name, date and guest count.
Brief the team. Trigger X days before the event with Create planner tasks adds your pre-event workflow to every booking: room set, AV check, signage, staffing.
Alert the Space contact about a site visit. Trigger When a client books an appointment with Remind the Space contact tells the person who looks after that room (appointments and the booking page).
Get paid on time. Invoice due soon and Invoice overdue email the person paying the invoice (chasing overdue invoices).
Win the rebooking. Trigger X days after the event at 300 asks a birthday or annual function client whether they would like to hold the date for next year.

Where a venue gets the most out of 1pm

The whole point for a venue is that it's one system of record for the entire operation. The lead, the quote, the signed confirmation, the BEO, the run of show, the supplier paperwork, the invoice, and the payment all live on one event, and every department works from the same live source instead of a printed BEO that's out of date by 6pm. That's the wedge: not any single feature, but the fact that the whole job, lead to paid, stops living across a dozen inboxes, spreadsheets, and PDFs and starts living in one place.

For the two event types most venues run most often, the wedding-day walkthrough (article 32) and the corporate-event walkthrough (article 68) pick up where this one leaves off.