Graduation operation · Table map
The ticket seat editor handles auditorium sections and rows. A ten-seat table with the family together is a different problem, and it's what generates complaints on the day: the mother-in-law split from her daughter, the father and stepmother side by side, the vegetarian guest the kitchen didn't know about. Here the venue has a stage and dance floor, tables are created in the right layout, family requests become rules checked before publishing, and the table draw has a recorded seed.
The problem and the fix
If any of these situations sounds familiar, it is because they happen in almost every graduation company, until the right system comes in.
Building the venue from scratch is what makes operators give up on the screen and go back to paper.
Eight ready-made venues with tables already in place, plus the company's own library: the partner caterer's venue is saved once and reapplied for every class, with the awkward pillar in the right spot.
The floor plan is a bunch of circles floating in empty space, and nobody knows where the front is.
The real venue goes into the floor plan: stage, dance floor, bar, DJ, buffet, entrance, restrooms, screen and pillars, positioned by dragging. That's what the team goes by when setting up the venue in the morning.
"Is this table near the stage?" is the family's first question on the phone, and nobody has the answer on screen.
Each table gets a zone based on its distance to the stage, and it's recalculated on its own: moving the stage in the editor changes the zone of sixty tables at once, without anyone redoing the math.
The father and stepmother at the same table is the most expensive problem of the dinner, and it only exists in the head of whoever is building the plan.
Seating rules with a recorded reason: sit together, sit at different tables or stay truly far apart, because the table next door satisfies the rule and solves nothing. A non-negotiable rule blocks publishing the floor plan.
Seating three hundred guests by hand takes days, and the button that does it automatically is the one nobody dares to press.
Automatic seating plans first and only applies when told to. The whole plan shows on screen, family by family, with each one's table and remaining seats. Undoing three hundred wrong assignments is half a day of work.
The table draw happens with slips of paper in a bag, and a week later someone disputes it.
Each draw stores the seed that generated it. With it, whoever had doubts reruns the draw and gets the same result. The minutes are printed with the order in which names were drawn.
The kitchen finds out on the day that there are seven vegetarians and two celiacs.
Dietary restrictions are tied to the seat, not the person, because what the kitchen cares about is that night's dinner. The summary comes out by type and by table, and the review flags any allergy entered without saying to what.
The next day the argument is about who moved whose table, and there's no way to answer.
The log is append-only: every assignment, swap, removal and block records who did it, when and from which table to which. That's what ends the conversation.
In practice
Everyday situations at graduation companies, from the problem to the result, using the modules on this page.
The floor plan for a new ball used to start from a blank floor, and placing tables one by one ate up the morning of someone already running late.
The "classic with central dance floor" template was applied to the plan: 24 ten-seat tables appeared positioned in two wings, with stage, dance floor, bar, buffet and entrance in place.
The work became adjusting what was different about that caterer's venue, and the plan was ready before the meeting with the committee.
The mother called asking that the graduate's father and his new family not be seated near her, and the request would have died in the notes of whoever took the call.
The service team logged a keep-apart rule between the two groups, with the reason written down. The review started flagging the violation while the plan was still a draft.
The plan was only published with the two families on opposite sides of the venue, and nobody had to remember the phone call at the last minute.
Families had submitted their guests, but fitting each group at a table with room was days of manual work.
Automatic seating simulated the plan with the largest families first, respecting quotas, capacity, table priority and seating rules. The committee read the plan on screen before approving it.
Once the plan was applied, six tricky cases were left to solve by hand, instead of three hundred.
A family questioned the table draw, claiming the good tables had gone to the usual suspects.
The minutes were delivered with the draw seed, the order in which names were drawn and how many tables were in the pool. Rerunning the draw with the same seed produced exactly the same result.
The dispute was settled in the same meeting, and the committee started announcing the seed before each draw.
How it works
Every step is a real module, and what comes out of one goes into the next without anyone typing it again.
Module by module
10 modules and 60 features on this page, all running on the same class, graduate and event records.
The venue layout built by dragging, identical on any screen.
Stage, dance floor, bar, pillars and everything that takes up floor space without being a table.
Eight ready-made venues plus the company's own library.
Sixty tables created in the right layout, not stacked in a grid.
How many seats each graduate has, and who wants to sit together.
Who sits together, who sits apart, and why.
The whole plan on screen before a single chair is touched.
With a recorded seed, so anyone with doubts can rerun it.
What goes from the floor plan to the caterer, the print shop and the wall.
Who has already arrived, without going back to the printed list and a pen.
Compare the modules and choose the setup that fits your operation.