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Hi everyone, and welcome to this SwiftFox Masterclass. Today we're looking at how to manage event bookings once they've been made and in particular how to handle the moment every event organiser knows is coming – when plans change and you need to remove an attendee, cancel a ticket or unwind an entire booking.

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Instead of going through step by step, this session will focus on the mental model behind bookings and tickets because once that's clear, the cancellation options stop feeling like a row of buttons and start making sense as a system. By the end, you'll know where to go, which action to reach for, and just as importantly, what each action does and doesn't do.

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Every time someone buys a ticket to your event, SwiftFox records our purchase in two places at once. It creates the underlying tickets, and it groups them into a booking, the single transaction that ties those tickets together. You'll find both views inside the invite list step of your event. In the two tabs at the top left of the page, the Invite list tab is your confirmed guest roster, the named people who are actually coming.

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The bookings tab is the transaction view, every purchase, how many tickets it includes, and its current status, whether that's paid, pending payment, or canceled.

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When you're making changes, the bookings tab is your home base. It's where you can see the full shape of a purchase and where all of the cancellation controls live.

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Not all bookings behave the same way, and the difference comes down to what a ticket actually is. Look at the small icon next to each booking. A single person icon is a general admission booking a stack of individual tickets that someone bought in one go.

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A multi-person icon is a group booking or table, a single block of seats sold as one unit, where each seat is simply a place you assign a name to. The distinction matters because of what sits underneath. In a general admission, booking each ticket is its own thing, so you can act on them one at a time.

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In a group booking the seats aren't separate tickets, they're allocations within one larger ticket. You can decide who sits in each seat, but the seats themselves can't be peeled off individually. This is why the two bookings give you different options when you open them, and why it's worth recognising which one you're working with before you start.

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When you open a general admission booking, you'll see each ticket listed with its own ticket status and a cancel booking button at the top.

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Each row has an action menu offering two choices Remove person, which clears the name from a ticket but keeps the ticket itself, useful for when an attendee drops out and you intend to give their place to someone else. Cancel ticket goes a step further and cancels that single ticket outright. That's the right tool when, say, one person from a group of four genuinely can't attend and you want their ticket gone rather than reassigned. If the whole purchase needs to be undone, the Cancel booking button cancels every ticket under that booking in one action, so a single purchase of four tickets is cleared in one step rather than four.

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Group bookings work differently, when you open a table booking, you'll see every seat, but you're only per seat option is remove person. Removing a person frees their place and the seat stays with the table ready for the next name.

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A table is sold as a fixed block. A table for ten exists as ten seats, or it doesn't exist at all. You can't quietly shrink it to nine. So if a table genuinely needs to go, you cancel the whole thing. Open that bookings menu in the bookings list and choose Cancel booking. In short, with a table you can move people in and out freely, but the table itself is all or nothing.

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There's one more thing to understand clearly because it affects your accounting. Canceling a ticket or a booking does exactly one thing automatically. It frees up the capacity the seat is released and your events numbers update so your remaining availability stays accurate. What it does not do is move any money. Canceling never triggers an automatic refund or credit, and it doesn't alter the original receipt. SwiftFox will prompt you with a reminder that any refund needs to be handled manually.

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It keeps you in control of exactly what's returned to whom and when, rather than making a financial decision on your behalf. The practical takeaway is to treat the cancellation as two separate steps; cancel in the bookings tab to free the seat, then process the refund yourself.

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So to bring it together, the bookings tab is where you manage change and the key is knowing whether you're holding a general admission booking, where tickets can be canceled one by one, or a group booking where seats can be reassigned but the table stands or falls as a whole, whichever you're working with. Remember that canceling frees the seat, but never the money. Refunds remain a deliberate manual step.

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If you're getting started, the simplest thing you can do is open a recent event, switch to the bookings tab and look at the icons. Once you can tell general admissions and group bookings apart at a glance, the right action follows naturally.

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Thank you for joining this masterclass. As always, if you have any questions, your SwiftFox account team is on hand to help.