How TidyHQ Saved Christmas

The Problem

The challenge involved collecting details and payments from approximately 1,000 attendees for a Children's Christmas party while enforcing member-only discount pricing and gathering children's information for Santa.

Background

The club, established nearly 90 years prior, previously managed bookings through paper forms, manual payment processing, and physical member ledgers. In more recent years they moved to online forms and payment processing, but these essentially replicated the old paper workflow and still required manual membership verification and reconciliation.

This meant:

• Staff spent days checking member numbers against a ledger
• Payments and registrations were handled separately
• Discount eligibility had to be verified by hand
• Children's details for Santa were incomplete or inconsistent

The Solution: TidyHQ Events

TidyHQ Events replaced the patchwork of paper and basic online forms with a single, structured event workflow. The club configured tickets and data collection rules to match their real-world policies:

• Member adults: paid tickets at a discounted rate
• Member children (0–15): free attendance
• Member children (0–12): eligible for Santa gifts
• Additional children: subsidised rates beyond the included member children
• Non-members: higher pricing, with gift eligibility for children under 13

Using TidyHQ Events, the organisers could:

• Offer member-only ticket pricing that automatically applied when logged-in members booked
• Enforce maximum ticket quantities per order to prevent abuse of discounts
• Collect extra information only on relevant ticket types, such as age and gender for children who would receive a gift from Santa

All attendee data and payments flowed into one place, with membership status verified automatically instead of manually.

Key Achievements

1. CSV exports for Santa's team

The downloadable Transaction CSV file gave Santa's helpers a clean dataset for age and gender calculations. This made it easy to order the right mix of gifts without guesswork.

1. Streamlined payment processing

Payments were taken at the time of booking, removing the need for manual reconciliation between forms, bank statements, and ledgers.

1. Automatic membership verification

Because TidyHQ knew who was a member, discount eligibility was enforced automatically, eliminating fraud and awkward follow-up conversations.

1. Invoice option for less tech-savvy users

Members who preferred not to pay online could still register via invoice, ensuring no one was excluded from the event.

1. Zero incomplete children's records

Required custom fields on children's tickets meant every child who needed a gift had complete details recorded. There were no missing ages or genders across all orders.

1. Automatic booking closure

The event automatically closed at the specified date and time, preventing late or over-capacity bookings and giving organisers a clear cut-off for planning.

"The Event's downloadable Transaction CSV file was a huge, largely unanticipated bonus," significantly reducing preparation work for Santa's supplier and saving days of manual effort.