Chobble Tickets vs Pen and Paper

Digital & low cost alternative to paper tickets

Paper tickets and a cash box work, and for a village hall raffle they may still be the right answer. They stop working when an event sells out twice over, when someone loses the list, or when the money and the names live in different places.

Chobble Tickets takes payment before the event, emails each attendee a ticket with a QR code, and tracks capacity for you. Capacity is used up when a payment is confirmed, and if two confirmed payments race for the last place the later one is refunded automatically.

It costs £50/year or £5/month, or £25/year for charities, community groups and schools on the annual plan.

Both approaches share some things

• Keeping a list of who's coming
• Checking people in at the door
• Keeping a local copy for use without an internet connection (pen and paper works offline; Chobble Tickets check-in requires a connection to the ticketing site)
• No mandatory attendee account required

When pen and paper works

For a small gathering where you know everyone, pen and paper is fine. There's no learning curve, no setup time, and no annual fee, so if you're running a dinner party for 20 people you don't need ticketing software.

When software helps

Pen and paper starts to struggle when:

• You're selling tickets online - You can't take card payments with a clipboard
• You need to track capacity - Overbooking is easy when multiple people are taking bookings
• You want confirmation emails - Attendees expect a booking confirmation they can refer back to
• You need to check people in - QR codes are faster and more reliable than scanning a list of names
• You're handling refunds - Tracking who paid what and who needs a refund gets messy on paper
• Multiple people are managing the event - Shared spreadsheets get out of sync

What Chobble Tickets adds over pen and paper

Chobble Tickets supports free events without payment setup, so even if you're not charging you can use it for the RSVP tracking, capacity management, and check-in features. Here is what you get:

• Online payments - accept card payments via Stripe, Square, or SumUp
• Capacity management - automatic capacity limits with refunds if two payments race for the last ticket
• QR code check-in - scan attendees in with any phone camera
• Email confirmations - automatic booking confirmations attendees can refer back to
• Refunds - track who paid what and process refunds in clicks
• Multi-user access - multiple people can manage the same event without things getting out of sync
• Apple & Google Wallet - attendees carry their tickets on their phone
• Custom questions - collect structured answers from attendees at checkout
• CSV export - export attendee lists when you need a spreadsheet
• Activity logs - see who did what and when
• Public-facing website with a contact form - a homepage, content pages, and a contact form, all edited from the admin panel in Markdown, running on your own domain with custom CSS