THE CHALLENGE
A film festival is several businesses running at once for ten days. Guests need accreditation and badges. The public needs tickets. Industry delegates need to book meetings with each other. The box office needs to take payments and reconcile them. Juries need to record votes. Most festivals run each of these on separate tools, or on none, and absorb the coordination cost in people and late nights.
The failure mode isn't dramatic. It's a screening that sells past capacity, an accredited guest whose badge doesn't exist, a market appointment double-booked, a revenue figure nobody can reconcile until January.
THE APPROACH
How we approached it
One system, built around the actual sequence of a festival rather than around software categories.
Registration and accreditation issue credentials and badges from a single record, so the person, their access level, and their badge are never separate things. Ticketing handles both public sales and free accredited tickets, with sales closing automatically 30 minutes before a screening and accredited holders able to release seats they won't use — which puts inventory back without anyone chasing it.
The industry market got a full public-facing appointment system with a multi-step booking flow, so delegates arrange their own meetings instead of the festival brokering them.
A point-of-sale layer covers on-site box office with per-cashier reporting. Financial reporting breaks revenue down by venue and separates ticket income from accreditation income, which is the split a festival board actually asks about. Admin tools cover reserved seats, jury voting results, order notes, discounting, and a public participants directory.
Email notification runs across all of it, so confirmations and changes reach people without manual sending.
THE RESULTS
What we delivered
- One platform replacing separate registration, ticketing, appointment, and box office processes - Automated ticket-sale cutoffs and self-service cancellation, removing manual seat management - Venue-level financial reporting with accreditation and ticket revenue separated - Public-facing market appointment booking, run by delegates rather than staff