Getting your data out

A platform that makes leaving difficult is telling you something about its confidence in the reasons to stay. Data portability is partly a feature and partly a statement of intent, and it is worth checking before you commit an event to any system rather than after.

Files

Attendee lists and sales data export as CSV, which is what your caterer, your badge printer and your accountant actually want. Not a proprietary format, not a PDF report that has to be retyped — a file that opens in a spreadsheet and can be sorted, filtered and handed to somebody else.

Invoices and tickets come out as PDF, which is the right format for those because they are documents rather than data.

The attendee export is the workhorse. It carries your custom checkout answers alongside the standard fields, so the dietary requirements you collected at the point of sale arrive already attached to the right person. That saves the reconciliation step where you match a separate survey to a booking by email address and discover that a stubborn 15% do not match.

The API

There is an HTTP API covering events, orders and tickets — the same surface the scanner app uses, which is a reasonable guarantee that it works, because the door depends on it.

Use it when a file on a schedule is not enough:

• Attendance in your CRM, so the record of who came lives with the record of who they are.
• Sales in your own dashboard, if you are running several channels and need one view.
• Your own check-in or on-site tooling, if you have specific needs the scanner app does not cover.

The advantage over exports is that it does not depend on anybody remembering to export a file on time.

Webhooks

Webhooks push events to you as they happen rather than waiting to be asked. A booking created, a booking confirmed, a payment received, an event published — your endpoint is called with the details at the moment it occurs.

This is the right tool when you want to react rather than poll:

• a message in your team chat on every sale, which is a genuinely good way to keep a small team engaged during an on-sale;
• a row appended to a sheet, for whatever your finance process actually is;
• a follow-up sequence in your own mailing tool, triggered by a confirmed booking;
• an alert when a target is hit.

Polling an API every minute to find out whether anything happened is the alternative, and it is worse in every dimension — slower, heavier, and it still misses things between polls.

Accounting exports

Sales data can be exported in a format your accounting package can read. At the end of a quarter this is considerably more useful than a screenshot of a dashboard, and it is the difference between an evening of retyping and a file import.

Why this matters beyond convenience

Under GDPR you are the controller of your attendees' personal data. The platform processes it on your instructions; the obligations are yours.

Being able to produce that data — and delete it — is part of the obligation rather than a feature you hope never to need. If an attendee exercises their right of access, you need to be able to answer. If they ask for erasure, you need to be able to act on it. A platform that cannot export is a platform that cannot help you comply, and the regulator's question is addressed to you, not to us.

The same applies to the more ordinary disaster: an event you need to run tomorrow and a system you cannot log into. A recent attendee export sitting on your own machine is the cheapest continuity plan there is, and it takes about ten seconds. Take one before every event.