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Tutorial · At the booth

Setting up an event

An event is one fair, market, show, or pop-up. Each one gets its own row in your Events sheet with tax rate, dates, location, booth fee, and mileage. About 5 minutes per event the first time, faster after that.

Time: ~5 minutes per event Difficulty: Easy if you know the venue details Prereq: Setup completed

What an event is in fiveanddime

An event is a single fair, market, show, festival, or pop-up. One booth-day (or weekend, or week) at one venue. Every sale you ring at the booth is tagged with the event it happened at, which is how the reports can show "$459 at Brighton on Saturday" or "your top sellers at Christkindlmarkt."

The template ships with one sample event, Test Event, so you could ring practice sales in the setup tutorial. Now we add real events as you book them.

Two ways to add an event

A

Directly in the Events sheet

Open your fiveanddime spreadsheet, click the Events tab at the bottom, scroll to the next blank row, fill it in. Fastest way to add several events at once (planning your season).

B

From the app, via Settings → Edit event

Open fiveanddime, go to Settings, expand Edit event. Type the event name (or pick from the dropdown if it exists), fill the form, save. The event lands in your spreadsheet immediately.

This is the path you'll usually take. It's faster on a phone and the form labels remind you of what each field does.

Settings Edit event form with fields filled in
The Edit event form, opened from Settings. EventID and EventName are the basics; the rest fill in the columns you'd otherwise type in the spreadsheet.
Adding a new event from Settings — EventID, name, dates, tax rate, booth fee, mileage, save.

The must-fill columns

Four columns every event needs:

Should-fill for accurate P&L

These aren't required but you'll want them once you care about profit numbers:

Optional / advanced columns

Commission events

Some venues, especially consignment-style spaces, take a percentage of every sale. The standard pattern: mark the event's PriceTier as commission, and the POS will use each product's PriceCommission column (a higher price you set in Products_Master) instead of the regular Price. The customer pays the higher number; the venue's cut comes out of the difference.

For this to work, you fill in PriceCommission on the products you'd sell at consignment venues. Blank PriceCommission falls back to the regular Price (no markup). Commission tier is opt-in per event.

Activating an event in the app

The Sale view always runs against one active event. The event chip at the top of the screen shows which one is currently selected. It sits in the middle of the top strip and reads with the event name and date.

To switch: tap the event chip, pick from the list. The list shows current and upcoming events at the top; past events lower down. Tap the one you want and the cart immediately starts ringing sales against that event.

Sale view with the event picker overlay open showing a list of events
Tap the event chip to open the picker. Current and upcoming events are at the top.

Test events: a practice mode

The template comes with one, but you can mark any event as a test by setting IsTestEvent to TRUE. While a test event is active:

Useful for trying out features, training a helper, or letting a kid play "store" without polluting your real data.

Don't rename EventID once sales exist

Sales rows reference EventID directly. If you rename a column value (say, BRIGHTON-JUN-2026 to BRIGHTON-2026), every sale that pointed at the old ID stops linking to the event in reports. EventName is safe to rename anytime; EventID is what every sale uses to find its event, so if you rename it the links break. If you really need to change an EventID, do a find-and-replace across both the Events and Sales sheets.

Practical: when to set events up

The night before. Whatever you know about the event by then is usually enough (name, date, tax rate, booth fee). Update Miles and any other details after the event if you forget. The app doesn't care; the math works as soon as the fields are populated.

Checkpoint Your Events sheet has rows for the events you've already booked. Each has at minimum an EventID, EventName, StartDate, and TaxRate. Booth fees and mileage are filled in for the events where you know them. The event chip in the app shows the right event when you select it.

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