Access From and Vacate By: the load-in window

Most of an event's clock is taken up by the event itself: the ceremony, the meal, the speeches, the music, the carriages. But for crew, the working day starts hours before doors and ends hours after the last guest. The two time markers that bracket that working day are Access From (when crew can first get into the room to start setting up) and Vacate By (when the room must be cleared so the venue can reset for the next booking).

On a Banquet Event Order they're the first thing every department reads.

This article covers where these fields live in 1pm, how they differ from the event's other times, who actually reads them on the night, and the venue-ops conventions that keep the load-in honest.

What Access From and Vacate By are

Access From is the earliest time crew can enter the function room or space to begin setting up. Most venues impose this as a contractual constraint: the room is being used by another booking before yours, or the banqueting team needs lead time to flip the room from breakfast service to a gala dinner. The bump-in might involve AV crew running cable, banqueting setting tables, the florist placing centrepieces, the band soundchecking, the lighting tech rigging — but none of it happens before Access From.

Vacate By is the latest time the room can still be in use. Crew who have not packed up by then are in breach of contract and usually triggering hourly overage charges that the venue is contractually entitled to invoice the client for. Vacate By is the line that determines whether your pack-down is on schedule or running into the red.

These two fields sit alongside the event's headline Start Time and End Time. Start and End describe when the event happens (doors 6:30pm, carriages 11pm); Access From and Vacate By describe when crew can work (load-in 12pm, vacate by 1am the following morning). The two pairs answer different questions for different audiences.

Where the fields live

Open any event in the planner and click the pencil icon on the event name to open the event edit form. Scroll to the BEO section. Access From and Vacate By sit at the top, as a pair of time inputs. Both are optional: an enquiry that hasn't firmed up the load-in window yet can have them blank, and the BEO simply omits them.

Set them with the time pickers, or type values directly in 24-hour format. Both are TimeOnly values, not full timestamps, so there's no date component. A Vacate By of 01:00 means 1am: the system assumes a vacate after midnight wraps to the next morning, since the alternative ("vacate at 1am the same morning the event hasn't yet happened") is never the intent.

Save the event. The two times now feed every surface that renders BEO data.

Where the times show up

• The planner header. A small icons-and-times row near the top of the planner shows Access From, Start Time, End Time, Vacate By at a glance. This is the four-number summary of the day's working clock.
• The BEO section on the planner. The Key Times block at the top of the BEO surfaces the four times in chronological order, with the load-in and vacate windows labelled.
• The live link. When crew open their share-link page, the briefing card at the top of the page surfaces Access From and Vacate By prominently, since these are the times crew actually need to internalise. Doors and end time are useful context; the load-in and vacate times are the contractual ones.
• The printable BEO. The Key Times block prints first on the BEO, before any other field. This is the venue convention: a department head reading a stack of BEOs for the day flicks through them and reads the times before anything else.
• The vendor portal. Each event row on a crew member's portal shows the event date and, when they open the event, the load-in window. Useful for the regular suppliers reviewing what's coming up over the next few weeks.

Who reads which time

• The AV crew and lighting tech read Access From first. Their bump-in is the longest of any supplier (rigging takes the most time) so they need to know when the doors unlock to plan when their truck arrives.
• The dock manager or venue duty manager reads both Access From and Vacate By. They're staffing the loading dock and the back-of-house corridor; if Access From says 12pm they have a dock attendant rostered to be on at 11:45.
• The banqueting team reads Access From because they're the team flipping the room after the previous booking. If lunch service ends at 2pm and Access From is 3pm, they have an hour to clear, polish, and re-set 25 round tables of 10. The hour is rarely enough, but that's a different conversation.
• The kitchen team reads Vacate By because last drinks and the pack-out of the room set the rhythm of their close-down (when the dishwashers stop running, when the chefs leave). They don't need Access From; they're in the kitchen regardless of when the function room opens.
• The pack-out crew (AV de-rig, banqueting reset) reads Vacate By as a deadline. Everything in the room must be out by then. The packing usually starts before Vacate By and runs right up to it.
• The client and the headline guests don't read Access From or Vacate By at all. They read Start Time and End Time. Don't confuse the two audiences.

Conventions that keep the load-in honest

Set Access From to the time the venue contractually permits, not the time you'd ideally like. The contract is the source of truth. If your AV crew wants 10am but the contract says 12pm, the BEO reads 12pm and any pre-12pm work is being negotiated outside the contract.

Set Vacate By to the time on the contract, then plan back from it. A reasonable pack-out for a corporate gala is 90 minutes (de-rig AV, strike lights, reset banquet tables, sweep floor). If Vacate By is 1am, the last guest needs to be out by 11:30 latest. Working back: carriages at 11pm gives the venue a 30-minute buffer before the de-rig truck arrives.

For multi-day load-ins where Access From is the day before the event itself, put the previous day's load-in on a separate timeline item (or a separate event in 1pm) rather than trying to encode it in the Access From time. Access From is a TimeOnly value; it can't represent "11am the day before". Either create a load-in event the day before, or write the bump-in schedule into a Details note on a 6am timeline item titled "Bump-in continues from yesterday".

If the venue rents you the room for setup the night before, that's not a multi-day event in 1pm's sense, it's a separate booking with its own Access From / Vacate By. Create it as its own event row (status: Confirmed, Pax: 0, Title: "Acme Awards bump-in"), link it from a Details note on the main event, and your AV crew gets a clean live link for the setup night.

A note on overtime billing

Most venue contracts charge overtime in 30-minute blocks past Vacate By. If your pack-out runs until 1:25am and Vacate By was 1am, expect 30 minutes of overage on the invoice. The Vacate By time is the venue's billing trigger, not a polite guideline.

For events where your client is paying the venue directly, the overage flows through to them automatically. For events where you're paying the venue and re-billing the client, you'll want a record of the actual pack-out time. The Close Out flow (article 55) captures actual durations against planned ones, so your final supplier reports include the real timing of the pack-out and you have a defensible line in the invoice conversation.

Summary

Access From and Vacate By are the load-in and load-out times, separate from the event's own Start and End. They sit on the BEO section of the event edit form, render on the planner header, the BEO, the live link, the vendor portal, and the printable BEO, and they're the first thing every department reads on the morning of the event. Set them to the contracted times, plan back from Vacate By for pack-out, and treat them as the contractual clock the night runs on.