The following are the key components around which your everyday usage of GEVME will revolve. More information about each component is available in their respective separate articles.
Invitees
Invitees are the people whom you plan to invite to your event. It’s the starting point where you build your contact list of people to invite for your event.
Attendees
The Attendee is the one who attends your event. In GEVME, the details of the attendee are captured through the Attendee Form.
Tickets
In GEVME, every time an attendee registers for an event, he/she is issued a ticket by the system. This means that every event created has at least 1 type of ticket created by default (there can be no event without any ticket setup). On top of that, as the organizer, you can create additional tickets if you want to categorize or segregate your attendees, e.g. you could have a Regular Ticket priced at $100 and a VIP Ticket priced at $400. In the illustration below, Jim chose to buy the VIP ticket.
Buyers
The Buyer is the one who is billed when there is payment involved in your registration. In GEVME, the details of the buyer are captured through the Buyer Form. This means that the buyer and buyer form really come into play when there is money involved.
For example, in the diagram below, Peter buys 2 tickets, one for himself and one for Jen, and Peter is the one making the payment (and thus the buyer).
Alternatively, in cases of free registration, the buyer form can also be used as the “main registrant’s” form, in cases where you want to allow one person to register on behalf of a group of people, e.g. a company’s admin person registering for a group of employees (the admin person himself/herself is thus not an attendee).
Orders
In GEVME, an Order is placed when the buyer submits a registration with payment. Thus, just like buyer and buyer form, orders really come into play when there is money involved.
Looking at the same example as above but from an “order perspective” would therefore translate into something like this:
Note: To be accurate, an order is placed even when a registration is free and involves no payment. It's just that the order is not relevant and not used in that case. So that means that even in the case of a free registration, an order (of a value of $0) and a corresponding buyer will be created by the system in the background.
Contacts
Contacts is the central repository where the core data from your participants across allyour events are collected and stored. Think of it as your central contacts/address book. When participants register for your events, their core data are pushed to and compiled under your Contacts (or if an attendee is already a contact, their data will be updated there). The email address is the field which is used to match and sync your attendees to your contacts.
To learn more about how data syncs and flows among invitees, attendees, buyers and contacts, see the article Collections in GEVME.