Create an event

Everything starts with an event: it holds your tickets, your ticketing page, your attendees and your messages. Sweescape offers two ways to create one, depending on whether you sell tickets or already have your guest list.

Choose the right type of event

When you click Create one event, the Create your event window offers two choices.

	Event with ticketing	Import participants
What it is for	Selling tickets, paid or free, on your ticketing page	Welcoming a guest list you already have (CSV or Excel file)
Ticket tab	Yes: tickets, codes, ticketing page	No
Payment	Collected on your Stripe account	None
Attendees	Buyers arrive on their own; you can also add people by hand	The people in your file, then more by file or by hand
Attendee fields	First name, last name, email, plus your custom fields	The columns of your file
Plan required	An active paid plan	Any plan

Both types of event have the Participants, Invitation, Automation, Extensions and Settings tabs, and their tickets are scanned with SweeScan.

The type is final

An event’s type cannot be changed after it is created. An event created by import will never have a Ticket tab: if you want to sell tickets, create an Event with ticketing.

Create an event with ticketing

Before you start, you need an active paid plan and a connected Stripe account to receive the money from your sales. See Connect Stripe.

1. On the Events page, click Create one event.

2. Choose Event with ticketing (“Create from scratch →”).

   

   If the card shows Ticketing Locked and “Upgrade plan →”, your plan does not include ticketing: clicking it opens the subscription window. See Plans and subscription.

   If no active Stripe account is connected, the window shows Stripe Configuration Required. Click Configure Stripe to go to the settings, connect your account, then come back to create the event.

3. Fill in the New Event form (each field is detailed below).

   

4. Click Create event. The button stays greyed out while a required field is empty or invalid.

The message “Event created successfully!” appears and the event opens. It has no tickets and no ticketing page yet: that is the next step.

The form fields

Field	What you need to know
Event name	At least 2 characters. This is the name shown in your dashboard, your analytics and your messages. You can change it later.
Start date	Date and time. It must be in the future.
End date	Date and time, equal to or after the start date. It determines whether the event is upcoming, ongoing or past.
Address	Type at least 3 characters: suggestions appear as you type, in the form “venue, street, postcode and city, country”. Picking a suggestion is required: the event is placed on the map at that spot. If you change the text after picking one, pick a suggestion again.
Stripe account	The account that collects this event’s sales. All your connected accounts are listed, but only an active account is accepted.
VAT	The rate applied to your tickets, among those of France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Belgium. Each option shows the countries that apply that rate. You enter prices including VAT: the VAT is taken out of the price. See Prices, VAT and fees.
Event Image	Optional: without an image, a default image is used. JPG or PNG, 1 MB maximum. Recommended size: 1920 x 1080 px. An image that is too large or in another format is rejected as soon as you drop it.

Stripe account and VAT cannot be changed

The Stripe account and the VAT rate cannot be changed after the event is created, neither in Settings nor anywhere else. Check them before you click Create event. To change them, you need to create a new event.

Create an event from a guest list

Use this option for an event without online sales: a private party, a seminar, a guest list sent by a partner. It is available on every plan.

1. On the Events page, click Create one event, then choose Import participants (“Import your csv →”).

2. In Import your participants, fill in Event name, Start date, End date and Address. The rules are the same as for an event with ticketing.

   

3. Drop your file into the Participant list area, or click it to choose the file. Until the fields above are valid, the area stays inactive and shows “Please enter an event name before inserting a file.”

There is no confirm button: the event is created as soon as the file is dropped. The message “Event imported successfully” appears and the event opens on your attendee list.

Prepare your file

• Accepted formats: CSV, XLSX or XLS. For an Excel file, only the first sheet is read.
• The first row holds the column names: “First name”, “Last name”, “Email”, “Phone”, “Company”… Each following row becomes an attendee.
• Each column becomes a required text field of the event. These columns cannot be changed afterwards: any file you import into this event later must have exactly the same ones.
• For a CSV, the separator (comma, semicolon…) is detected automatically and empty rows are skipped. Save it as UTF-8 to keep accented characters (in Excel: “CSV UTF-8”), or drop the XLSX file directly.
• A file over 10 MB, or in another format, is rejected as soon as you drop it. Drop one file at a time.

Think about invitations now

If you plan to send invitations by email or SMS, include a column with the email address and one with the phone number. You will pick that column when you set up the sending. See Send invitations.

Common error messages

Message	What to do
The start date and time must be later than the current date and time.	The start date is in the past: choose an upcoming date and time.
The end date must be after the start date.	The end date is before the start date.
Choose an address from the suggestions.	Shown under the Address field: the address was typed or changed without picking a suggestion. Click one of the suggestions in the list. If none fits, type the city or street name to get others.
Address search is unavailable right now, please retry in a moment.	Address suggestions are not responding. Wait a moment, then type a few letters again in the Address field.
The stripe account is inactive, please retry with a valid stripe account!	Finish setting up this account in Stripe, or choose another one.
The invoice company does not exist, complete your company information on settings stripe!	Fill in your company information for this Stripe account in the settings, then try again.
This image is too large. The maximum size is 1 MB.	The image is over 1 MB: compress it.
This image format is not supported. Use a JPG or PNG image.	The image is neither JPG nor PNG.
Invalid csv data, please retry with a valid csv, xlsx, or xls file!	The file contains no readable attendee row.
This file is too large. The maximum size is 10 MB.	The attendee file is over 10 MB.
This file format is not supported. Use a CSV, XLSX or XLS file.	The file is not a CSV or Excel file.

What next?

For an event with ticketing, we recommend this order:

1. Create your tickets in the Ticket tab.
2. Choose the information you ask buyers for, before the first sale.
3. Build your ticketing page, then publish it.
4. Prepare the invitation email your buyers will receive.

You can also invite a collaborator to prepare the event together.