A registration group lets one organization register multiple attendees together and pay with one order. As staff, you can create the group for the organization, add attendees one at a time, and check out all pending registrations in one purchase.
Groups appears in the event’s side menu only after you turn on group registration for the event.
Prerequisites
- Group registration must be turned on in the event’s registration settings.
- You must be able to open the event whose group you want to manage.
Configure Group Registration Settings for the Event
Group registration does not have its own role or permission field. People can use it based on the same purchasing eligibility you set for packages or for roles allowed to buy the related registration.
- Go to Meetings & Shows › Events › [event name] › Setup › Registration › Settings, then scroll to Group Registration.
- Turn on group registration, then set the registration deadlines and any tiered group pricing for the event.
- Choose the contact form group registrants complete. If you need a form other than the default, create it first, then select it here.
- Choose who should receive the individual registration confirmation emails, and decide whether this event’s group orders can use organization credits.
- Save your changes, then run a test group registration to confirm your settings work as expected.
The group administrator always receives a group registration confirmation email by default. If you also turn on individual confirmation emails, the group administrator receives a copy of each registrant’s confirmation, one per registrant, in addition to the group confirmation. If you only want the administrator to receive the single group-level email, set Who should receive the individual registration confirmation emails? to The individual registrant (recommended) so only the registrant receives their own confirmation.
Credit card processing fees for a group order come from the event’s Registration Settings, not from a registration process’s Override Checkout Settings, because one group can include registrants tied to different processes. A fee set only in a process-level override is not added during group checkout. Some events also let a group order use an organization’s open credits at checkout when the order is billed to that organization. If you expect a group order to use an existing organization credit balance, ask an administrator whether that option is turned on.
Set Up a Group for an Organization
- Go to Meetings & Shows › Events › [event name] › Groups.
- Choose Create a Group.
- Under Organization & Administrator:, choose the organization the group belongs to. Rhythm fills in the group’s Name: with the organization’s name, and you can change it.
- Choose a contact from that organization as the group’s administrator.
- Choose Save Changes.
The organization must appear in universal search before you can select it here. If an organization record does not appear in search results, it may not appear in this picker either. If your account uses Descendant Contact Management, that setting also controls whether contacts from the organization’s child organizations are available to add to the group. In Console and Portal, contacts may fail to load for an organization with an unusually large number of child organizations. If attendees or contacts do not load for one organization but work normally for others, the number of child organizations is the likely cause.
Always choose an administrator contact in step 4, even though the field is not required. A group saved without an administrator contact can error when you open it later or fail when you add its first attendee. If that happens, delete the group and create it again with a contact selected. Deleting is straightforward as long as the group does not have registrations yet.
Result
Rhythm saves the group and opens its record page. The Completed Registrations and Pending Registrations tabs stay empty until you add attendees.
Register a New Attendee Into an Existing Group
- Go to Meetings & Shows › Events › [event name] › Groups, search for the group, and open it.
- On either tab, choose Register New Attendee.
- Complete the registration form that opens, just as an attendee would when registering directly.
If you select an existing contact instead of entering a new one, the badge information’s Organization field can stay blank even though the same contact’s organization fills in during individual registration. Check that field and fill it in by hand if the badge needs it. The first and last name fields on this form are configured globally as shown for everyone or hidden for everyone. You cannot show them only when someone creates a new contact and hide them when someone updates an existing contact. Add instructional text to the form if that distinction matters to your registrants.
Result
Rhythm adds the new registration to the group as a draft on the Pending Registrations tab until it is checked out.
Tip
To add a registration record without sending someone through the registration form, choose Manually Create Registration on either tab. Use this option to correct a mistake or add a complimentary attendee, for example. Rhythm links the new record to the group automatically, but only the normal registration-form path above also creates and links a commerce order. A registration added with Manually Create Registration has no order date and no related order record, so it will not appear in order-based reporting the way a checked-out registration does. See Register Someone or Change a Registration in the Console.
Check Out the Group's Pending Registrations
Attendees added to a group remain drafts until someone pays for all of them together.
- On the group’s Pending Registrations tab, choose Complete Group Registration Purchase. This button appears only when the group has at least one draft registration.
- Complete the order details and confirmation steps, just as you would for any Console checkout.
Result
Rhythm creates one order for all of the group’s pending registrations and submits it for payment. After the order is paid, the drafts become completed registrations and move to the Completed Registrations tab.
The order uses the invoice template from the event’s business unit or its Registration Settings. An invoice template set only at the registration-process level is not used for a group order, even when the group’s registrants are tied to that process. Because Rhythm processes each registrant separately while building the order, members of the same group can have slightly different order dates. If the organization is the billed payment method, each registrant still keeps their own order and purchase history, even though the organization is invoiced. When you check out for an organization and choose to invoice instead of pay immediately, the invoice belongs to the organization. Only staff or portal users with permission to bill that organization have been able to pay it, and it is not automatically available as an individual contact’s own invoice.
While a group’s order is unpaid, its registrants should not see an editable registration in the Portal, and they should not be able to complete a separate modify-registration order for it. The group order needs to be paid first. Some group registrations have also not sent the group administrator’s individual confirmation emails, even when settings called for the administrator to receive both the group and individual confirmations. If a confirmation is missing, check whether the registrant received theirs instead of assuming the administrator’s copy was sent.
If registrations were checked out into the wrong group and received incorrect pricing, the most reliable fix is to cancel those registrations and register the same people again together in the correct group. After a group’s order and invoice are completed, you cannot add a later or separate registration to that original invoice. A new or re-registered attendee gets a new order through a fresh checkout. If special group pricing was lost at checkout, staff can process the registration in the Console and then adjust the line item’s price directly on the Order Details page as a temporary correction. If a registration is stuck in Draft status after checkout, reprocess it with Complete Group Registration Purchase instead of editing its status directly. A past fix for stuck Draft registrations did not automatically correct registrations that were already affected, so those registrations needed the same manual reprocessing.
Warning
If one group member is already registered for the event when you check out, the whole group checkout fails instead of skipping that member. Remove or reassign the conflicting registration first.
For a very large group, checkout can occasionally build the order successfully and then fail later during processing with a server error. If that happens, contact Support instead of assuming the registrations went through. If a failed attempt leaves the group itself stuck pending, delete that pending group before you recreate it. Splitting a large submission into two or more smaller group registrations has also worked as a practical fallback when a single large submission fails.
Reorder or Remove a Pending Registration
On the Pending Registrations tab, use the move-up and move-down arrows beside a row to change the order in which registrations were added. Those arrows change the registration’s Group Order value, which is an internal sequence number for its position within the group. It is not the same as the Order used to purchase the registration, so do not confuse the two when you trace a registration’s order. Each pending row should show that registrant’s own amount. If a row shows the full combined group order total instead, treat that as a display issue and check the actual order for the correct per-person amount. Use the trash icon to delete a draft registration you no longer want to check out. You cannot delete a registration from the Completed Registrations tab here; open the registration directly if you need to cancel or delete it.
Expected Result and Side Effects
- You can change a group’s name, organization, and administrator at any time from Edit Group on its record page.
- Delete Group removes an empty group. A group with completed or pending registrations cannot be deleted until those registrations are removed or moved elsewhere.
- Group checkout does not use organization-level group discounts, credits, or any coupon code entered on an individual member’s own draft. Those are not carried into the combined order, unless your event allows the group order to apply organization credits. In that case, open organization credits can be loaded when the order is billed to an organization. Organization-held credits are organization-level funds. Historically, any contact linked to the organization could use them, and they applied to organizational invoices instead of an individual’s own event registration.
- In the registration view, other attendees tied to the same exhibitor organization or registration-group context can appear alongside a registrant and look like guests or duplicate entries. They are usually separate registrations with their own tickets, not an error, so confirm the group or exhibitor relationship before you assume a record is duplicated.
- Registrations created through group registration appear on the same event attendee list as individually registered attendees; they are not kept separate. The Groups Overview report can also include extra output fields such as Created By, and order modifications show their own modification date.
- Finance batch exports for group registration orders reflect the group order’s billed owner, which is the organization or contact set as the payer, rather than the registration recipient used as ship-to. Overriding the ship-to registrant does not change which contact or organization the export shows as billed.
- Group registration does not currently provide a way for an account manager or group administrator to view registrations directly from their own contact or profile record. Use the event’s Groups area instead.
- In the Portal, the option to add someone not already on the group’s list is always available to self-service group registrants. There is currently no way to remove it and restrict registration to only the people already listed.
- Cancelling a group registration through a processed credit memo has not had a documented way to reverse it. For example, restoring the registration to its original quantity by issuing a debit memo has not been confirmed to work.
If Something Goes Wrong
| What you see | What it means and what to do |
|---|---|
| Groups does not appear in the event's side menu | Group registration is not turned on for the event. Turn it on in the event’s registration settings. |
| Complete Group Registration Purchase does not appear | The group has no pending draft registrations to check out. Add an attendee first. |
| Group checkout fails | One of the group’s pending members may already have an active or pending-approval registration for the event. Find and resolve that registration, then try checkout again. |
| Delete Group is refused | The group still has completed or pending registrations. Remove or move them first. |
| A group cannot be opened individually | The group may have been created without a primary contact. Open the event's Groups tab, use the Groups KPI to open the query, choose Bulk Changes, select the group, use Change Records, choose Mass Delete, and confirm the preview to delete it. Then recreate the group with a contact selected. |
| Registering a new attendee into a group fails | Check the registration package's Member price. Some group registrations only proceed once the package's Member price is set to $0 rather than left blank. |