Reporting

Real event attendance vs registrations: what to report to your client

By SOMOS DER · October 30, 2026 · 6 min read

The real attendance of an event is the number of different people who checked in at the door, not the number who registered and not the number of scans. Registrations include everyone who never came; scans include duplicates and rejections. If you are an agency running an event in Argentina for a brand, a sponsor or a head office in another country, unique check-ins are the only figure you can defend in the wrap report. This guide explains how to get that number, how to break it down and how to send it home.

Why the registration number misleads

A registration is an intention, not a fact. Between the day someone signs up and the day of the event, things happen: a meeting overlaps, it rains, they forget. At free events, the gap between registrations and attendance is usually wide, and that is normal.

There is a second, quieter distortion: the list gets dirty. The same person who registered twice because the first email never arrived counts as two registrations. If you report registrations, you are reporting a number inflated for two different reasons at once, and a client who later sees the photos of a half full room will notice.

When you organize from abroad, this matters more. Your client was not in the room. The report is their only evidence of what happened, and often the document that justifies the budget or the sponsor fee for next year.

The number that holds: unique check-ins

The correct measure counts each person once, even if their code was scanned several times. That is what an accreditation system with one unique code per person does: once a code has been used at a check-in point, the next attempt is logged as a duplicate and does not add to the count.

Counting at the door is also standard crowd practice, not just a marketing exercise. The UK Health and Safety Executive's page on crowd monitoring notes that "counting systems at entry and exit points can help you estimate numbers within your venue", and lists ticket checking among the ways staff can do it. A QR check-in gives you that count and, as a by product, the attendance figure for the report.

In PASE, the count is the same in the live report, in the closing report and in the capacity alerts: always different people who checked in. One rule, so the numbers on different screens match.

Scans and people are not the same

Every scan is recorded, including those that let nobody in. That is why PASE shows two layers separately:

• Checked in: different people who entered. This is the real attendance.
• Registered: the full attendee list.
• Still to come: the difference between the two, live.
• Valid, duplicate and rejected scans: how the door operation is going.
• Total scans: the actual work the door team did.

Duplicates and rejections are not noise. Many duplicates often mean shared codes or people retrying because they did not understand the flow. Many rejections often mean someone is trying to enter a zone they are not allowed in, or the permission setup is wrong.

The average hides what matters: look by category

A 60% overall turnout can be a good result or a disaster depending on how it splits. If every sponsor guest came and the general public did not, you have a different problem than if it happened the other way around. For a client abroad, the question is usually specific: did the people we invested in actually show up?

That is why the PASE report breaks registrations and check-ins down by attendee category, which is where the real no-show shows up. It is also the figure that decides how many invitations to send next time and which ones need a confirmation call.

By hour and by gate: planning the next edition

The report also splits entries by hour and by check-in point. The hourly view shows the real peak, the half hour when most people arrived. That number, not the total, is what you use to size the door next time.

The gate view tells you whether the check-in points were well balanced or whether one took everyone's work. Because the live report updates by itself during the event, you can fix that on the spot by moving an operator. If you load the venue capacity, PASE emails an alert at 80% and 100%. The 80% alert is the useful one: it comes while you can still act.

One setting changes the number. Each check-in point either consumes the pass or only validates it. The main entrance must consume it, because that is what counts as the person having entered. Validate only mode is for rooms people walk in and out of, and by design it does not add to attendance. If the main entrance is set to validate only, you will report fewer attendees than you had.

Sending the report home

When the event ends, the closing report stays: real attendance, percentage over registrations and the breakdown by category, check-in point and hour. You can share it by link with the client or the sponsors, and that public report shows totals and breakdowns without attendees' personal data. If someone needs the named list, the attendee list can be filtered by category and by status (checked in or not) and exported to CSV.

Think before you send that list abroad. Argentina's data protection law, Law 25,326, requires data to be "ciertos, adecuados, pertinentes y no excesivos" (accurate, adequate, relevant and not excessive) for its purpose, and its article 12 prohibits transferring personal data to countries or international bodies that do not provide adequate levels of protection, with specific exceptions. Aggregated numbers usually answer the client's question; send names only when there is a clear reason and a proper basis to do so.

Registrations are how many people said they would come. Check-ins are how many came. Only the second one holds up in front of a client.

Frequently asked questions