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Most events happen again. The annual convention, the spring show and the yearly gala each look a lot like the last one, and recreating them from scratch is tedious work that invites mistakes.

With Conference and Event Management you save an event as a template when it is over. The template keeps the event's structure: the kinds of items it offered, their settings, their names, their order and its home page. When next year's event comes around, you create it from the template and start with everything already in place, then change only what is new.

Templates can stay "in the family", available only to your organization. Or, at your option, you can make your template available to every organization that uses Conference and Event Management, so others can start from what worked for you.

The time you save on setup is time you can spend on the parts of your event that really need you: your speakers, your sponsors and your attendees.

Sponsors keep many events affordable, and they deserve to be treated well. Conference and Event Management lets you build sponsor packages at as many levels as you like, from Platinum down to Bronze or whatever your levels are called, each with its price, its list of benefits and how many are available.

A title sponsor gets the recognition it paid for. Once the title sponsor is paid in full, "Presented By" with the sponsor's logo and name appears with your event's title on your event's pages. Room sponsors can put their name on a room, and your sponsor list can be placed on your home page or in an email, grouped by level, with each sponsor's logo and website.

Sponsorship agreements come from your packages, ready to print or save as a PDF for a prospective sponsor. When the signed agreement comes back, it is stored with the sponsor, along with their logo, their contact details and a short About Us of their own.

Everything about a sponsor is in one place, so the next time someone asks whether they paid, whether we have their logo, or whether the agreement is signed, the answer is a click away.

Large events rarely fit in one building. A convention might use a hotel's ballrooms, a breakout room down the street and a museum across town. Conference and Event Management handles several venues for one event, each with as many rooms as it has, and keeps track of which rooms your event is using and on which days.

Rooms can be renamed for your event without changing the venue's own records. That matters more than you might think. If you sell room naming rights as part of a sponsorship, Ballroom B can carry the sponsor's name on your schedule and calendar, while the venue still knows it as Ballroom B. Next year the room can carry a different name for a different sponsor.

Not every room is a room. If you have ever tried to schedule something in a tent in the parking lot, a pavilion or a hospitality suite, you know most systems will not let you. In Conference and Event Management an odd space is simply another room, with its own name, its own dates and its own place on your calendar.

Each event also sets its own details for every room, such as how it is set up (theater, classroom and so on) and the dates it is in use, so the same venue can be arranged differently for every event you hold there.

Many organizations offer some items only to their members: a members' banquet, a members-only tour, or a discounted registration. The hard part has always been knowing, at the moment someone registers, whether they really are a member.

Conference and Event Management can ask your membership system directly, in real time. All we need is an API that answers True or False when we send it a membership number. If it says True, the members-only items are available. If it says False, they are not. There is no list to upload and nothing to keep in sync.

Membership numbers are matched without the dashes, spaces and slashes that creep in when people type them, so 12-3456 and 12 3456 are the same member. Attendees who have registered with you before can be found by their membership number and last name, and their details are filled in for them.

The result is simpler for everyone. Members get what they are entitled to without having to prove it by email, and you never have to refund a non-member who slipped through.

Here is a story from our own past. One registration system we used charged us 12% on payments because we used their credit card processor, and it would not let us use our own. On a convention with a few hundred attendees, that is real money that should have gone to the event.

Conference and Event Management lets you use your own credit card processor, so the rates you have already negotiated stay yours. If you do not have one, or would rather not manage one, you can use ours, with the payment types we accept and our rates shown up front.

Not everyone pays by card. Plenty of attendees, especially in clubs and associations, still prefer to mail a check. Offline payments via US Mail are part of the system, so those attendees can register the same way as everyone else.

Sales tax is figured line by line on the items that are subject to it, and attendees see what they owe before they pay. No surprises for them, and no surprises for you.

For many events, nothing else counts until an attendee has registered for the event itself. Conference and Event Management lets you require that. Mark an item as the registration, and attendees cannot add seminars, meals or tours until a registration is in place. No more chasing people who bought a banquet ticket but never actually registered.

Families and groups are handled the same way. Rather than ordering three of something and typing the other names into a comment box, each person can be registered on their own. You are not reading notes and comments to work out who is who, and you are not building name badges outside the system, because each attendee carries their own name on badge.

You can also limit what can be ordered. Items can be limited to members, closed a set number of days before the event, and given a maximum number of participants, counted for each date and time they are offered, so the last seat cannot be sold twice.

Every rule we check is one less mistake an attendee can make, and one less refund you have to issue because someone ordered the wrong thing.

Every event in Conference and Event Management gets a custom home page, and so does every organization. It is not a template with your name pasted into a banner. It is a full editor where you write the page the way you want it, with your own fonts, colors, photos, tables and logos.

You can add as many pages as you need, such as a schedule overview, hotel information, a sponsors page or a page of frequently asked questions, and arrange them in a menu across the top, in a sidebar, or both. Pages can sit under other pages, and you drag them into the order you want. A footer with your contact details and social media links rounds it out.

Merge fields keep the page current without retyping. Drop in your event's dates, a map of the primary venue, the items for a track, or your sponsors grouped by level, and the page shows what is in the system right now. When a sponsor signs on or a seminar is added, the page already knows.

Most importantly, your attendees see your event, not ours. Your logo leads the page, your theme sets the colors, and the way to register is right there in the header.

If you have ever bent your event to fit someone else's registration software, you know the feeling. The software decides what a session is, what a ticket is and what you are allowed to call things, and you spend the rest of the planning season working around it.

Conference and Event Management is completely configurable. You choose which kinds of items your event offers, whether that is seminars, clinics, tours, meals, merchandise or something we have never heard of, and you name each of them in your own words. Each one has its own settings: whether it goes on the schedule, whether it has a presenter or an owner, whether attendees must register for it or prepay, whether it has an offsite address, and much more.

Turn on only the pieces you need and the forms stay clean. A one day meeting does not have to look like a five day convention, and a convention does not have to squeeze into a form designed for a dinner party.

Not ready to configure anything? You do not have to. Start from our standard list of item types and use it "out of the box", then adjust it as you learn what your event needs.

Before Conference and Event Management was software, it was experience. We bring more than 30 years of event management to the table, and we have worked on everything from a small meeting of eight people to national conventions with more than 2,000 attendees. The size of the crowd changes, but the questions never do: who is coming, what did they sign up for, where will they be, and has everyone paid?

One of our founders has also photographed more than 650 weddings. If you have never thought about it, the wedding photographer is one of the very few vendors who is there for almost the entire day. That vantage point shows you every hand off, every schedule that slips by ten minutes, and every detail that someone assumed somebody else was handling.

We built Conference and Event Management around those lessons. Registration, schedules, rooms, sponsors, presenters, payments and your event's own home page all live in one place, so the details stop falling between the cracks of separate spreadsheets and separate systems.

Over the coming weeks this blog will take one feature, one kind of event or one part of how we work at a time and show you how it fits together. If there is something you would like us to write about, send us a note through Contact Us.