Admission covers people walking in — selling day tickets at a museum or exhibit, or simply counting who turns up to something you are hosting. This walkthrough covers price tiers, verification, operating hours, and the visitor dashboard.
What admission is for
The traditional case is a museum selling admission to a specific exhibit, or to the site in its entirety. It works equally well for tracking how many people show up to something you host away from your own premises — a talk you are giving in a plaza or a town square.
Tracking free admission without collecting donor details
If you are using admission purely to track items with no cost attached, no donor information is collected. You are simply recording how many people showed up, or how many you are admitting to that particular activity.
How admission differs from events
Events carry entitlements: a specific event ticket purchase, event registration, guest names, potential restrictions on a ticket type, event-specific pricing, and membership benefits such as percentages off.
Admission is the simpler case — someone walks into or shows up at a physical location and takes part in the activity.
Admission Settings: where to start
Where to find it. From your dashboard, open Admission → Admission Settings.
This is where you set your price tiers and assign any additional membership benefits that apply to admission.
Turning admission on, and operating hours
The admission configuration setting controls whether admission is active for your organization at all.
Operating hours are set per day of the week — for example every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Switch a day off and admission is closed for that day.
Price tiers: name, price, eligibility, and order
For each tier you set:
- the ticket name, which should describe the type of admission being sold
- the price amount
- an eligibility description
- whether verification is required by your staff
- the order it appears in on your point of sale or kiosk tablet
Verification, and what PineconeAI does and does not do
PineconeAI does not perform the verification for an admission sale. It alerts the staff member or volunteer that the verification process is required before that admission ticket can be sold. The check itself happens at the desk.
Example tiers and qualifying details
Student and EBT cardholder tiers typically require verification. Other tiers carry qualifying details instead: adult tiers usually have none, while senior might be limited to 62 and over, youth to 4 to 18, and children to 3 and under. Military and EBT cardholder details are set the same way.
Designing your tiers: price-based or purpose-based
When setting your price tiers, think about how you want to categorize your visitation, not only how you want to charge for it.
If your admission is free, every tier can be $0 — you may still want to know how many adults, seniors, and children came through. A military museum might instead track active military, retired military, family members of a military individual, and guests with no military connection.
So your tiers can be price sensitive and price specific, or purpose sensitive and purpose specific.
Membership benefits at admission
A membership tier can carry an admission benefit — for example free admission for two guests total at a given level. If you charge for membership, this is the straightforward way to make that benefit apply at the door.
The visitor dashboard
The visitor dashboard gives you a view of all visitation to your organization. It opens on a daily view, and the calendar selector changes the period.
You get daily visitor counts by ticket type, the revenue generated from each, and a daily visitor trend graph at the top you can drill into.
