How to use it

Pick the kind of site

A street market, an outdoor festival, a wedding, a banquet, a concert, a classroom, a trade show, or a blank site. This sets the size of the ground and which arrangement you start with. Nothing else is assumed — no streets or stages appear unless you place them.

Say whether it is indoors or out

The first thing a visitor asks and the first thing a trader asks, and a rectangle looks the same either way. It shows on the plan as a sentence people can act on.

Metres or feet

Whichever you think in. Every box, every size on the plan and the scale bar follow it. Anybody reading your plan can switch their own view without changing anything you set.

Name it and shape it

Two questions: how many rows, and how many spaces in each. Sizes and gaps are already the ones the trade uses — a 3m stall, a 6m stand, a table for ten — and fold away under “Sizes and spacing” if you want them.

Every box explains itself

Tap the small i beside any field for a diagram of what it measures, what it is for, where what you type shows up, and a worked figure for your kind of event. The diagram is usually the whole answer — words are what you read if it was not.

Or skip all of it

Start with a shape instead: pick something that looks like your space, roughly how big, and go straight to placing things. No event type, no measurements. You can set real sizes later or never.

Check it, then create it

You see the plan before it exists, with anything wrong flagged underneath. Nothing is saved until you say so.

Drag anything

Spaces, roads, stages, poles, fire lanes. Everything snaps to a one-metre grid and to its neighbours. Turn snapping off to place by eye.

Or use the keyboard

Arrow keys nudge 25cm, with shift for a metre. Delete removes what is selected. ⌘/Ctrl+Z undoes. Escape puts down whatever you picked up, then deselects. G and S toggle the grid and snapping. None of this fires while you are typing.

Add from the palette

Drag an item straight onto the plan, or tap it and then tap where it goes — both work. Its definition appears as soon as you pick it up, so you know what you are placing before you place it.

Name a space anything you like

Spaces get numbered A1, B14, which is right almost always. For the one everybody calls “the Kiosk” or “Top table”, type that instead and the plan, the list and the printout all follow. Clearing it puts the number back, and the space keeps its identity throughout — a request or an imported row against it survives the rename.

Zoom in

A seat is half a metre on a site that might be a hundred. Zoom, drag to move around, or go full screen.

Select several at once

Shift-click to add to a selection, or drag across empty ground to take everything you drag over. ⌘/Ctrl+A takes the lot. Then drag any of them and they all move together, keeping their spacing.

Drag things to size

Roads, canopies, ponds, keep-clear strips — anything not for sale has a corner handle. A road is as long as the road is. Spaces you sell are deliberately fixed: a 3m stall is 3m because that is what was sold.

Make it bigger

A hundred-metre site in a half-width column draws a stall two pixels across. Zoom the editor, or go full screen — the palette and every control come with it, so full screen is where you work rather than somewhere you look.

Spaces do not stack

Drop a stall onto another stall and it steps aside to the nearest clear ground — two stalls in one square metre cannot both be sold, and the one underneath is invisible. Nudging one into its neighbour is left alone, because that is you adjusting rather than missing.

Save an object for next time

Your toilet block is always the same size with the same words on it. Save it once and it appears in the palette under Your objects, ready to drop onto any plan. Editing or deleting it later never touches plans you already built.

Make the site bigger or smaller

Under the plan summary. Sketching for your bearings rather than measuring is a perfectly good reason — the scale bar keeps telling the truth about whatever size you set.

Click a space, type a name

The form fills instantly from whatever you clicked — no page reload — so naming twenty stalls is twenty clicks, not twenty page loads.

One button saves everything

Name, description, link and status all save together when you press Open, Held or Confirmed. At the counter those are one action, so here they are too.

Three states, always

Open means nobody has it. Held means promised but not settled — agreed on a phone call, not yet paid. Confirmed means certain. Held is where most of an event lives and is the thing a spreadsheet handles worst.

Describe anything, not just spaces

Amenities, stages, exits and streets take a description and a link too. Visitors tap them to read it. The description stays with the object when you move, rename or resize it, and goes when you delete it.

Blocks first, then stalls

Nobody lays out a market by placing ninety stalls. Say how many blocks and how big, and the roads appear between them already named — 1st Street, A Avenue — the way a town is numbered. Rename any of them by tapping it.

Trace over a photograph

Put an aerial shot or a venue floor plan underneath and draw on top of it. Remove it at the end and everything you traced stays exactly where it is.

Set its scale with two points

Click two things you know the real distance between — the ends of a building, the width of a gateway — and type that distance. This is the step that matters: an image at the wrong scale makes everything traced from it wrong by the same amount, and nothing looks odd.

Got a PDF?

Export or screenshot the page as an image first — every PDF viewer does this in one click. We do not read PDFs directly on purpose: it needs a large piece of software with a long history of being the way trouble gets in.

Import from a spreadsheet

One column of space refs, one of names, and optionally description and website. Save it as CSV from anything. We show you exactly what it would do before anything changes.

Nothing happens until you say so twice

You see what matched, what it would replace, and what it could not find. That last one is worth reading — a ref that matches nothing is usually a booking about to go missing.

Names arrive held

Not confirmed. Confirmed means money has changed hands and a spreadsheet cannot know that.

A blank name frees the space

Deleting somebody from your spreadsheet is how you say the booking fell through, so that is what it does here.

Anyone with the link can read it

No account, no app, no sign-up. Treat the link as public — anyone holding it can see the plan.

Visitors mark and print

They tick the spaces they came for and print. Their list comes out first, on its own page, in walking order. It stays in their browser and never reaches us.

Requests come to you

Somebody can ask for an open space. You approve or decline. Nothing is booked or paid — you still agree terms and then put their name on it.

Embed it on your site

One line of HTML puts the live plan on your own website. Confirm a stall here and it changes there.

Let people search it

Visitors type a name, a trade or a number and the matches light up on the drawing. They arrive knowing a name, not a number.

Turn requests off where they do not belong

A market wants the enquiries. A wedding does not, and a classroom seating plan certainly does not. It is a switch per plan.

Put a password on a private plan

For a wedding or a private function whose link will get forwarded further than you meant. Visitors are asked for it before they see anything — not even the plan name.

Your own web address

boothmanagerpro.com/your-name, with every plan you publish under it. Worth getting right once: changing it releases the old word and any poster carrying it stops working.

Findings, not failures

A plan halfway through being rearranged is allowed to be wrong. Problems are listed under the plan rather than blocking you.

Keep-clear is the serious one

Fire lanes and egress routes are the only thing with an outside authority behind them, so a space overlapping one is an error rather than a suggestion. It is still your responsibility, not ours — we do not know your venue or your licence.

One row per problem

Dropping a fire lane across a row reports once, counting the spaces affected, rather than once per stall.