Your organiser dashboard
Once you are signed in, all your Exhibitors trade stand information is kept under the Organisers tab. Your 'work horse' page is 'My organised events' where you can approve or decline your exhibitors - even "from a sunbed on a beach" as one organiser told us.
Event Owl creates a list and separates the work areas for each of your events, complete with exhibitor status and downloadable spreadsheets you can use at your event if you've no Wi-fi on site. Just download it, save it as a document beforehand and away you go.
We have standardised the exhibitor booking and application forms to ensure this information is clearer for the exhibitor, yet you can create more question fields on your application form which are added as new columns on your spreadsheet. However, this is not advised once you've gone live as this will skew your spreadsheet.
We can take bookings by phone once an Exhibitor has a profile in under two minutes, however this is for the odd exception and is not the rule. We will always inform you via email when you have a new applicant.
Approve or Decline an Exhibitor
- Sign in
- Select Organisers, then My organised events
- Go to the event you wish to work on
- In the far right column Purchases, you will see Exhibitors (number) if this in bold then you have an application awaiting a decision.
- Click on Exhibitors (number) to reveal who has applied. It will have Awaiting Approval. If the Awaiting Approval is in bold purple it means they applied over two weeks ago and should take priority.
- BEFORE you get too exited by your first exhibitor booking, please follow our advice:
- Check their sale's receipt to see what they've booked (never send them your sales receipt, yours differs from the one they receive as our fees are added to it).
- Check their application form to see if what they have booked marries with the type of exhibitor they are. If they are a Street Food trader, like any application, check what they wish to sell. These days many caterers sell tea/coffee/soft drinks and there are many cross overs in menu's too. Note: an exhibitor can edit their application form within their own dashboard, this is useful if you need them to better specify what they wish to sell. We've often found images of Street Food traders provide a better idea of the size and scope of what they do - they can upload images at any time, or of course their social media accounts so do ask them to do this.
- Check their risk assessment is satisfactory for your event - most use our HSE based template, check they have put on their company name, their name and a date - if they use a gazebo have they covered this? Many forget!
- Check their Insurance document/image details marry with the insurance details boxes on their form
- If you click on their name - left column, this opens up a simple exhibitor profile page where you can visit their website/social media accounts, and other events they've booked into with Event Owl etc
- You can apply a set discount BEFORE you click accept, see our FAQ's for advice on how this works
- THEN click approve or decline - we will check their card has sufficient funds available, and check the card for validity. All being well, funds will be with you in your bank account in five days (10 days for your first events first transaction batches).
NOTE: If you prolong your decision to approve (which is a bit unfair on your Exhibitors really as they will be organising their diaries, and may get snapped up by other organisers in the meantime!) we will highlight this to you in pink on your Exhibitor list. Please check all your pages.
Getting paid
During the set up process of your event, you will have connected your Stripe account to your Event Owl account. Once you commence approving traderts the first wave of payments via Stripe always takes between 7 - 10 days to show up in your bank account. This is down to the banking system, not ourselves. You will be notified on the My organised events page, under the Exhibitors list as to the payment status of each Trader you have approved. Please chase those who you see with an error code against it. Although we attempt to take payment three times off their card, it is ultimately down to the organiser to chase the Trader for payment. We can do this for you, and chase out of date insurance information, but as it's an extra admin task at our end too we do charge extra for this service, but it might save you some time. Please contact us for a price.
Refunding
If an Exhibitor wishes to Withdraw from your event and their payment, be this either a Deposit (in which case wait to refund once their funds are in your account) or Paid in Full, you must refund them from your Stripe account if you have one, or email our team who will orchestrate this for you on your behalf. This is for security purposes and also to recoup the Stripe fee you (or if you've passed it on) the trader. Event Owl must have written authority to refund someone via your connected bank account. All entries are logged
Refunds take between 5 - 7 days to reach their account and the system will reflect the refund on your spreadsheet and theirs. They will not have access to their Sales Receipt if a full refund has been issued.
Click here for the instructions on how to refund
Sales Receipts
Event Owl creates automated sales receipts for each transaction. If you are VAT registered and need to charge vat on some/all of your exhibitor packages, you MUST provide your company registration number and vat details in your profile or Business details page (under Edit an event) first. We will then add all your company reg. and VAT information on the sales receipt. You can also use a separate logo.
Organisers can always see their sales receipts, HOWEVER, your exhibitors sales receipt shows our Event Owl fee and Stripe processing fee if you have absorbed one or both, they don't need to known this information. Also, they can only see their receipt once their funds have cleared into your Stripe account.
You DO NOT need to send them a sales receipt - they can download their own, once funds from a payment have cleared, at any time from their own dashboard.
Documents
The Exhibitors risk assessment, public liability insurance and any other documents they send/need to send to you as part of the application, are attached at the bottom of each application form. These can be opened on your device if you have MS Word, Excel or an Adobe PDF reader. Some Exhibitors may attach Jpegs and other images.
Discounts
The system also you to create promotional/discount codes up to 99%. 100% discounts must be cleared through Event Owl. See under your Organiser FAQ's for further information.
Promotion
Event Owl promotes your event on social media and via our e-newsletters to thousands of exhibitors only if you are taking paid bookings though our system. HOwever, it is the full responsiblity of the event organsier to undertake all marketing of their event to traders, sponsors and visitors alike. Event Owl is merely a tool for you to save some time.
Event Owl also notifies both you and the exhibitor at every stage of the process, no need for individual emails to advise on 'yes, we have your application', 'no, we have not made our decision yet', 'yes, we received payment' etc.
You can print off all your exhibitor details or use (where there is wi-fi) a tablet or smart phone to show your Health and Safety guru’s. Make sure you have Adobe Reader, MS Word and Excel apps on your device/s.
You can also extend your exhibitor application deadlines under the Business details page.
If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us or an organiser telephone 'hotline' will be made available to you (this number is NOT for traders).
You are in control of who exhibits at your event, and for all the information you ask Event Owl to advertise.