What's New – December 2020

Hello everyone,

Another year gone and what a year it’s been! These last several months have been rather trying for us—from shifting to remote work and online meetings to launching our very own virtual events solution, it’s been nothing short of hectic. If you haven’t already, take a look at our recent post where we talk about the pivotal moments that defined Backstage in 2020.

Moving on to Backstage's recent updates, this month’s release has been all about filling the gaps—these new features give more depth to existing ones, increasing both usability and cohesion. Read on to learn more.

Offline payments made easy

This is a feature a lot of our users wanted and we get why—it’s just not feasible to expect all payments to happen online. There will always be at least one part of the audience who prefer to make payments the old-fashioned way—cheque, cash, and otherwise.

In Backstage, you can accept offline payments at the venue (via cash or digital payments), cheque, bank transfer, or any other method you see fit. You can leave attendees a set of instructions for how they can make their payment on the checkout page. As and when you receive payments from attendees, you can mark their order as paid.

We’ve also added two other options to make handling offline payments more flexible for you. First, you can choose to issue tickets either at the time of the registration or at the time of payment confirmation. And second, if for some reason an attendee’s payment fails, you can still check them into the event and get the payment later on. Both these settings can be managed in the Advanced settings tab of an event’s Tickets tab.

To set up offline payment methods: Go to Settings > Payment > Payment setup

Add hosts for streamlined session management

The problem with having too many people on board with access to everything is that it promotes chaos. You’ll never know for sure who is doing what (and what mistakes they’re making) until it’s already done. By assigning individual tasks to each member of your team, you can reduce a significant amount of confusion. This is especially important when managing sessions. The last thing you need is multiple people trying to manage the same session at the same time.

When you assign specific hosts for each hall (in the case of onsite events) and each track (in the case of online events), you can give your team a chance to be more organized as everyone knows their duty. Also, as only the host can start and end sessions, there’s less chance for someone else ending a live session by mistake.

To add session hosts: Go to Manage > Hosts

Other updates

Post-Brexit, the following change will be applicable for users with the United Kingdom as their payout country: For events where Do not charge VAT for VAT-registered purchasers from selected EU countries is selected in an event's tax settings, it will only be applied to purchasers from the United Kingdom. If the United Kingdom is not part of the selected countries list, the event's tax setting will be set as Charge VAT for all purchasers.

That’s it for this month’s updates. We hope you’re happy with the latest additions to Backstage. As always, if there’s anything you need or if you’d like to pass on some feedback, you can send us an email to support@zohobackstage.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Happy 2021!