Running the Door: Guest Lists, Comps, and the Walk-Up Problem

Everything upstream — the bill, the deal, the promotion — is settled by what happens in a two-hour window at a table by the entrance. Doors is where the money is actually collected and where it's most often lost.

Guest lists: set the rule before anyone asks

Guest lists grow because there's no rule, and every individual request is reasonable. Set the number in advance and put it in the confirmation email: two per band member, plus two for the band is a normal starting point for a small show. Everything beyond it is a decision you make, not a default.

Then hold two lines that matter:

• Names in by a deadline, ideally the day before. "Can you add someone" at 9pm is how a list doubles.

• Guest list is not plus-ones. A name on the list is one person unless it says +1. This single ambiguity accounts for a remarkable share of door arguments.

Comps are a cost, so count them

Every comp is a ticket that didn't sell. That's fine — comps do real work, for press, for the venue, for people who'll book you later — but they need to be counted and visible at settlement.

Twenty comps at $12 is $240 the night didn't earn. If your fixed costs were $630, you just moved break-even by twenty tickets. Track pass types separately (guest, comp, industry, band) so the settlement sheet distinguishes people who never intended to pay from people who didn't arrive.

The walk-up problem

A large share of a small show's audience decides at 9pm. They're your best customers — no fees, full price, cash in hand — and they're the ones most easily lost, because they arrive in a clump while whoever's on the door is looking someone up on a list.

What kills walk-ups is queue time. Three things fix it:

• Sell and admit in one action. Take the money and mark them in immediately; don't issue a ticket you then scan two seconds later.

• Separate the queues if you can — advance ticket-holders and guest list to one side, walk-ups to the other. Advance holders scan in seconds and shouldn't be stuck behind a cash transaction.

• Have change. A $50 note at a $12 door with no float is a sixty-second stall while eight people wait.

Somebody other than you should run it

The promoter should not be on the door. You need to be dealing with the sound engineer, the bands, and the venue, and a door person who has to find you for every decision is worse than no door person.

Give whoever's on the door the rules in writing: the guest list, the comp policy, the walk-up price, and what to do about disputes (answer: let them in, note the name, tell you later — never argue at the door in front of a queue).

The counts you need at the end

Before you settle, you need four numbers: advance tickets scanned in, walk-ups sold, comps and guests admitted, and total heads. Without those, settlement is a negotiation about attendance rather than a calculation.

Hand the door a tool, not a clipboard

Musavise's ticketing tool gives whoever's on the door a link that works on their own phone with no account: scans QR tickets, flags duplicates and voided tickets, sells and admits walk-ups in one tap, carries the guest list with arrivals ticked off, and keeps a live count of the room against capacity. Your first ticketed show is free.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.