Manual Orders

Manual orders let you raise a booking on somebody’s behalf, from the event’s own Orders screen, for the situations the public checkout was never built to cover — a phone booking, a comp for a sponsor, an invoice customer, or someone who genuinely cannot pay online. You pick the tickets, name the attendee, and either send them a link to pay or, for a free order, confirm it on the spot.

What you can do here

• Open it from the Manual order button in the Orders header (.../manage/orders/create). It only appears if you hold the order-management permission for this event.
• Enter the buyer’s name, email and phone, then choose one or more ticket types and a quantity for each.
• Each ticket type is quoted at its effective price — the current price after any active pricing rule, flash sale or member price is applied, exactly what the public page would charge right now. The figure you see on screen is the figure the buyer is asked to pay.
• Name the attendee holding each ticket if you know it; leave any of them blank and the buyer’s own name is used on that ticket instead.
• Apply a discount code if the buyer is entitled to one — it is checked the same way the public checkout checks it, not waved through because you typed it in.
• Set how long the tickets are held for the buyer before the order is given up as unpaid.

The hold

• Hold the tickets for is measured in hours and defaults to 168 — seven days. That default has not changed; it used to be shown as 10,080 minutes, a number nobody could read at a glance, so the field now reads in hours instead.
• There is also an exact date-and-time field. Set it and it wins over the hours field — use it when the hold has to end at a specific moment, such as the night before doors, rather than a round number of hours counted from when you raised the order.
• Setting the hours to 0 means no expiry at all: the tickets stay held until you cancel the order yourself.
• While an order is held, the tickets are reserved for that buyer. If the hold runs out with nothing paid, the order expires and the seats go back on general sale.

What happens after you submit

1. If there is nothing left to pay — a fully comped order, or a discount that brings the total to zero — the order is confirmed immediately and the attendee is emailed their tickets straightaway, the same as any other free booking.
2. Otherwise the order is created as an approved, unpaid order and the buyer is emailed a link to a normal payment page — the same checkout everybody else uses, so they pay by whatever methods you accept there, and the same confirmation and ticket emails follow once it clears.
3. The order appears on the Orders screen as soon as it is raised, whether or not it has been paid yet.
4. If a payment link has gone stale before the buyer got to it, open the order and use Resend. Resending revives an order the hold already expired on and gives it a fresh window; it will not touch an order that was cancelled or refunded, and it does nothing once the order has already been paid.

Good to know

• This form deliberately skips your own order limits — the maximum tickets per order, per ticket type or per buyer that apply on the public page — and says so on screen. It exists for a named guest you have decided to seat, not as a way to work around your own rules at scale.
• It also does not stop you overselling. The remaining count is shown next to each ticket type and turns amber once it runs out, but the order can still be raised. Nothing is actually taken from inventory until the buyer pays, so raising more orders than you have seats for is possible, and managing that is on you.
• A discount code that cannot be redeemed is refused outright, not silently dropped — you get an on-screen error rather than a booking that quietly charged full price after telling the buyer they had a discount.
• Raising a manual order needs the same permission as approving a pending one, so a box office role can be given exactly that without also handing them full event management.
• The email you enter for the buyer is where the payment link, or the free confirmation, is sent, and it goes on their own ticket. A name typed for a different attendee does not carry an email or phone of its own unless you type one for that row too.

Troubleshooting

• Manual order button is missing — you need the order-management permission on this event; ask the event owner to grant it if you are on a sub-role.
• Buyer says the payment link has stopped working — the hold most likely ran out. Open the order and use Resend; on an expired order this puts it back in front of the buyer with a new window rather than sending a link to a dead page.
• Discount code was rejected — the same rules apply as at checkout: wrong event, expired, past its use limit, or already used by this buyer.
• An attendee’s name is missing from their ticket — that row was left blank when the order was raised, so the buyer’s own name was used instead; open the order afterwards to edit the ticket holders.
• Resend does nothing — it only revives an order that is genuinely expired and still unpaid; a paid, cancelled or refunded order is left exactly as it is.

Related

• Orders
• Ticket Types
• Invoices