Everything people ask us, answered.

Spreadsheets are flexible, but they become difficult to keep in sync as an event grows. The same time, location, attendee or staffing information often ends up copied into several different files and views. Cothena keeps those relationships connected, so one change can flow through the schedules, runsheets, guest information and other places that depend on it.

Project management tools are excellent for managing tasks and deadlines. Events also depend on sessions, people, venues, capacity, bookings, time zones, guest agendas and live operational changes. Cothena connects tasks to that wider event structure rather than treating them as the structure itself.

Many event platforms begin with registration, ticketing or attendee engagement. Cothena goes further into the operational side of the event: planning, staffing, schedules, venues, tasks, runsheets, communication, capacity and registration all connect to the same underlying plan. You can use that whole system or only the parts your event needs.

No. Cothena's planning and operational tools can be useful on their own. If you use Cothena for registration as well, bookings, capacity, schedules, payments and guest communication can stay connected without additional syncing.

No. You can continue using your existing communication tools where that makes sense. Cothena also supports conversations and notifications linked directly to the activities they relate to, which is useful when you want decisions and context to remain connected to the event plan.

Depending on how you use it, Cothena can bring together work that would otherwise live across scheduling spreadsheets, task tools, ticketing systems, event apps, shared documents, messaging and payment workflows. You do not have to replace everything at once. Start with the areas where disconnected tools are creating the most work.

The repetitive coordination work around an event: copying schedule changes between documents, chasing progress updates, reconciling booking and capacity information, maintaining different versions for different audiences, and answering questions that should already be visible.

A clearer operational picture and access to the information relevant to their work. Staff can see schedules, tasks, runsheets, notes, alerts and changes without relying on one person to keep everyone updated manually.

Cothena is built for teams that bring people together around a programme: workshops, trainings, courses, community events, conferences, festivals, corporate events, incentive programmes and more. The common thread is not event size. It is that people, schedules, places, bookings and communication all need to stay coordinated.

Yes. You do not need a dedicated events department to use Cothena. Members, guests, volunteers and staff can each get the schedules and information relevant to them, while registration and communication stay connected to the same event plan. When the next season or edition comes around, you can build from what already worked rather than starting again.

It can be as simple as one session with people booking onto it. Start with a schedule, a booking page and confirmations, then add more capabilities only when you need them.

Yes. Cothena works particularly well when different guest groups need different itineraries, languages, locations and communication while the team works from one connected plan. For a Nikon Lenswear event in Tokyo, Cothena supported tailored multilingual itineraries in nine languages for hundreds of international guests, while staff worked from their own operational views.

Build the underlying programme once, then give each guest group the activities, locations, content and language relevant to them. When the plan changes, connected itineraries update from the same source instead of requiring separate documents to be maintained and redistributed.

It can replace much of the coordination work that typically accumulates around a production spreadsheet. Schedules, runsheets, tasks, roles, notes and progress stay connected, so teams do not have to maintain separate versions every time something changes.

Tasks, notes, conversations, schedules and previous event setups remain attached to the work they relate to. That gives new team members more context about how past events were run without relying entirely on knowledge held by one person.

Yes. Create different booking experiences for audiences such as VIPs, members, students, partners or sponsors, with their own messaging, pricing and payment routing while drawing from shared availability.

Yes. Give partners, sponsors or affiliates their own booking pages and tracked links, so you can see which channel generated each booking while keeping inventory and event operations connected.

Yes. Balancing rules can manage the ratio between defined groups, such as members and guests or buyers and suppliers. When a booking would move the balance outside your rules, it can be redirected or waitlisted until capacity or the required balance becomes available.

No. Clone the existing event and reuse its schedules, tasks, content, roles and booking setup, then adapt the dates, venues, spaces and local details for the next city.

Keep the core structure consistent across editions while changing what genuinely needs to be local: venues, teams, languages, currencies, pricing, branding and payment routing.

Yes. Central teams can keep oversight across editions while roles and permissions keep local staff, suppliers and volunteers focused on the schedules and information relevant to them.

Update the schedule once and connected staff views, runsheets and guest information can reflect the change. Tasks and progress also remain visible, so the team can see what needs attention without relying on status messages and manual updates.

Give each person a view of the schedules, tasks and information relevant to their role, while authorised team members retain access to the wider operational picture. That lets more people act with context instead of waiting for one coordinator to interpret every change.

Create the schedules your event needs and add activities directly to them. Activities can carry their time, venue, space, content, tasks and other operational information. You can also clone existing schedules or activities and link shared activities across multiple schedules.

Yes. Drag activities to a different time, space or schedule and keep the connected operational and guest views aligned with the change.

Yes. Define relationships between activities and visualise what depends on what, so you can understand the effect of a delay or scheduling change before making it.

Yes. Add notes to activities, tasks and runsheets and decide which information should appear in different staff or guest views.

Yes. Activities can carry their venue, space, map information and time zone, so staff and guests can see where something is happening and when.

Create the venues your event needs, add their time zones and map information, and break them into the spaces where activities actually happen. Once an activity is assigned to a space, its location and local time stay connected to the schedule.

Yes. Define rooms and other spaces within each venue and give them their own capacity settings. Capacity can reflect how the space is being used, such as seated, standing, theatre or banquet layouts.

Sub-spaces let you divide a larger area into smaller operational spaces, such as conference booths, reception zones or individual stations. Each can have its own capacity and schedule, giving you more precise control over how the venue is used.

Set capacity at the level that makes sense for the venue, from an entire room down to individual sub-spaces. Availability stays connected to the activities and bookings using that space.

Yes. Each venue can carry its own time zone, so activities and schedules resolve to the correct local time even when an event spans multiple cities or countries.

Yes. Set capacity by headcount, area or layout, so the same room can have different limits depending on how it is configured.

Yes. Share a space's total capacity across simultaneous activities, so parallel sessions can run in the same area without exceeding the overall limit.

Venues, rooms and key locations can be shown with custom shapes and spatial context rather than simple map pins, giving staff and guests a clearer sense of the space.

Yes. Structure venues across buildings, floors, rooms and smaller areas as deeply as the real venue requires. A two-room studio and a multi-building campus can both be represented without forcing unnecessary complexity.

Yes. Activities can show their venue, room and map information directly in the guest schedule, so attendees can quickly see where they need to go.

You can replace or retire a space and remap the affected activities, capacity and bookings to a new location without rebuilding the event.

Yes. Cothena keeps customer records connected across bookings and can recognise common email variations, helping reduce duplicate profiles and fragmented booking history.

Yes. Customer communication preferences can be managed per service or booking experience instead of treating every contact as part of one global mailing list.

Cothena uses the customer's language preference for the relevant service, so emails and other communications can be delivered in the version intended for them.

Yes. Preview the recipients of a broadcast and the language each person will receive before anything is sent.

Yes. Customer details such as names can be corrected while protected account identifiers remain controlled, reducing the risk of accidentally changing the wrong customer record.

Yes. Create booking pages for different audiences, offers, partners or sales channels while keeping them connected to the same event, schedules and capacity.

Yes. Create multiple booking pages for the same event, each with its own audience, messaging, pricing and configuration while drawing from shared availability.

Registration is connected directly to the rest of the event operation. Different audiences can have different booking experiences, partners can have tracked booking pages, payments can route to different accounts, and bookings stay connected to schedules and capacity.

Yes. Create tailored booking experiences for audiences such as VIPs, students, members, exhibitors, partners or regional groups, each with its own pricing, messaging and form fields.

Yes. Group selected events into browsable overview pages and decide which events appear for each audience or partner.

Yes. A payment-first flow lets customers secure their place before completing the longer attendee form, which can make checkout quicker. The remaining details can be completed afterwards or passed to the attendee who needs to provide them.

Yes. Give partners, sponsors or affiliates their own tracked booking pages and links, so you can see which channel generated each booking.

You can run separate booking pages with different messaging, pricing or presentation and track them independently.

Yes. A zero-cost booking flow can collect staff or volunteer details and place people into an approval or waitlist process where needed.

Products can be connected to the schedules they include, so a confirmed booking gives the customer access to the relevant programme automatically. Because registration and scheduling share the same event structure, availability can stay aligned across different booking pages.

When availability runs out, customers can join a first-come-first-served waitlist. When a place becomes available, it can be offered to the next person in line automatically. Staff can also manage entries manually when needed.

Capacity is held as a customer moves through booking, helping prevent the same availability from being sold twice during simultaneous checkouts. Staff and customer-facing booking pages work from the same live availability.

Yes. Balancing rules can redirect bookings away from busy sessions according to thresholds and ratios you define. If no suitable alternative is available, the customer can move to a waitlist instead.

Yes. When capacity is temporarily held during checkout, customers can see a live countdown showing how long the reservation remains available.

Yes. Configure how a product should be sold and what should happen when the preferred option is no longer available, such as offering another session or moving the customer to a waitlist.

Yes. Booking changes such as creation, payment, cancellation and waitlist promotion are recorded with when they happened and what caused them. That gives staff a clear history when they need to understand what happened with a booking.

Yes. Every booking can provide a QR code and mobile link, giving guests quick access without searching through old emails.

Yes. Staff can create bookings on a customer's behalf by phone or in person and capture attendee details as they go. Authorised staff can also handle special cases that require different capacity rules.

Yes. Make changes across a group of bookings in one action, such as moving a cohort to another session or assigning the same resource to everyone.

A package combines one or more products into a single bookable offer with its own price and booking rules. For example, one package might include access to several sessions while another uses some of the same sessions with different pricing or eligibility.

Yes. Reuse the same session, resource or other product across multiple packages instead of duplicating it. Changes remain connected wherever that product is sold.

Yes. Clone a package across runs, events, venues or schedules and choose which details carry over, such as pricing, images and session times.

Yes. Preview how a threshold or ratio would behave against real or hypothetical demand before applying it, including which packages would be affected and why.

Yes. A group booking can include multiple attendees, with each person's details and terms acceptance captured individually in the same flow.

Yes. Create event-specific messaging for different booking outcomes, including confirmations, cancellations, waitlists, and situations where another booking option is offered.

Yes. Attach useful content directly to the booking, such as practical information, instructions or related offerings, so customers can find it alongside their booking details.

Yes. Cothena is designed to keep the operational picture connected while the event is running. Schedule changes, staff views, runsheets, tasks and guest information can all stay aligned as the plan changes.

Update the central schedule and connected views can reflect the change without maintaining separate versions by hand. That reduces the risk of staff or guests working from outdated information.

Changes to the schedule can reach connected operational and guest views within seconds, so teams are working from the same current plan.

Yes. The progress dashboard shows tasks moving through their current stages across the event, including what is complete, still in progress or blocked.

Blocked tasks remain visible in the progress view so the team can quickly see where attention is needed.

Yes. Cothena flags overlapping assignments when the same staff member or volunteer is scheduled in two places at the same time.

Yes. Define relationships between activities and visualise what depends on what, so the impact of a delay or scheduling change is easier to understand.

Yes. When cloning an event, you can remap its venues and spaces to new locations while keeping the wider event structure intact.

Yes. Send push notifications to supported phones, tablets and browsers so guests and staff can receive timely event updates.

Yes. Prepare notifications in advance and choose when they should be sent, reducing the number of manual communications your team has to manage during the event.

Notifications can be targeted to the schedules or audiences they relate to, so the update reaches the people who actually need it.

Yes. Notifications can be sent in the recipient's relevant language, helping international audiences receive updates they can understand.

Yes. Event emails can use your own branding and be sent from your own domain, with localised versions where needed.

Conversations stay attached to the activity they relate to, so decisions and context remain connected to the work rather than disappearing into a general chat channel.

Yes. Conversation history stays connected to the relevant activity, giving the team a record of what was discussed and why.

Yes. Messages appear in real time for participants in the conversation, giving teams a live communication channel rather than an email-style exchange.

Yes. Staff can keep multiple conversations accessible while working elsewhere in the management dashboard, making it easier to coordinate several issues at once.

Yes. Conversation access can stay aligned with the relevant booking and participants as the booking changes.

Yes. Unread counts and recent activity make it easier to see which conversations are waiting for a response.

Yes. Prepare subject lines, body copy and translations in draft, review them, and publish only when the message is ready.

Yes. Send a test through the real delivery setup before going live, helping you catch formatting or mail-delivery issues first.

Yes. Sent emails are recorded with their recipients, content and delivery outcome, so your team can check what happened when a customer reports a missing message.

Yes. Export delivery history for an event and date range as CSV or JSON for reporting, record-keeping or dispute resolution.

Cothena brings the wider planning context into the same place as your event schedule, so you can see potential conflicts before committing to a date. Compare your plans with holidays, external calendars, venue usage and weather context instead of checking each source separately.

Yes. The planner makes it easier to see where your preferred dates overlap with other events, holidays, venue usage or other information you have brought into the calendar. That gives you more context before dates are announced, venues are confirmed, or registration opens.

Yes. Public holidays and cultural or religious observances can be viewed in the context of the countries, regions and time zones relevant to your event. That is particularly useful when your guests, teams or event locations span several markets.

Yes. Weather forecasts and historical patterns can add another layer of context when you are comparing dates, particularly for outdoor events, travel or programmes where conditions matter.

Yes. Bring relevant external calendars into the planner, such as industry events, sports fixtures, partner calendars or other dates that could affect your audience.

You can combine relevant calendars with the way venues and spaces are already being used across your event schedules, giving you a broader view of availability before you lock in a date.

The schedules, tasks, notes, conversations and event structures your team creates remain connected to the work they came from. That gives future teams a practical record of how previous events were prepared and delivered.

Their operational context does not disappear with them. Previous schedules, tasks, notes and event setups remain available for the next person to review and build from. That reduces the amount of critical event knowledge held only in one person's memory or private files.

They can start from the existing event structure and review how previous editions were organised, including schedules, responsibilities, tasks and notes. That gives them context before they need to ask someone else to explain every part of the operation.

Yes. Previous events, schedules, activities and packages can be cloned and adapted rather than rebuilt from scratch. That lets your team keep proven structures while changing the dates, venues, people and details that genuinely need to be different.

It can. Each event leaves behind a clearer operational record and a stronger starting point for the next one. Instead of recreating the process every year, teams can refine what already worked and make deliberate changes where it did not.

Yes. Reusable event structures, schedules, tasks and roles can act as practical playbooks for recurring programmes, annual events, roadshows and repeat productions. That helps different teams or locations work from the same underlying approach without forcing every event to be identical.

You may still want dedicated handover material for some roles, but much of the operational context can already live alongside the schedules, tasks, notes and workflows it relates to. That reduces the amount of information that has to be recreated purely for handover.

Create different booking experiences for the audiences you serve, with messaging, pricing and forms tailored to each one. Booking pages can then be shared through your own website, newsletters, social channels, messages, partners and affiliates.

Cothena can reduce manual coordination, consolidate work spread across multiple tools, and give you clearer information about bookings, revenue, capacity and partner performance. The commercial impact will depend on how your events operate, but the aim is to help your team spend less time maintaining the operation and make better-informed decisions.

Yes. Partner and affiliate booking pages can use tracked links, allowing you to see which bookings came through each channel.

Cothena supports shorter booking flows, including the option to take payment first and collect attendee details afterwards. That lets you move longer forms out of the initial checkout when the event does not require all information upfront.

The event dashboard brings readiness and registration information together, including what still needs attention, booking status, registration volume, packages and revenue.

Book a conversation and tell us about an event you are actually running. We can use that as the context for showing how Cothena would fit your schedules, registration, team, venues and guest experience.

There are two ways to buy, and the pricing page has a calculator for both. Pay per Event prices one event at a time: an event platform fee covering the people who manage it, plus the people who register. Annual buys a year of capacity, with your registration allowance pooled across every event you run. Neither is priced per seat or per month, and both are the same platform.

On an annual plan, yes — it is included for every event the plan covers. Paying per event it is an optional add-on, priced by the size of the event that needs it, and you turn it on for the events that want one. Either way it is the same app.

It depends on how often you run. Pay per Event suits an occasional programme — you pay for the event in front of you and nothing recurs. Annual suits a year-round schedule: you buy a capacity envelope, registrations pool across all your events, the attendee mobile app is included, and the rates work out lower as the programme grows. The calculator on the pricing page prices both, so you can compare your own numbers rather than guess.

No. Your Cothena organisation is permanent regardless of how you buy. Run one event, come back a year later and run another, and your team, venues, past events and configuration are all still there. An annual plan buys capacity for the year — it is not what makes the account persistent.

You pay for what you went over at your plan's rate, rather than being pushed onto the next plan up. Two events more than your plan includes costs two additional events, not an upgrade. Team size is the exception: it decides which plan fits rather than adding a charge per person, so a team beyond a plan's capacity moves to the next one. The calculator costs every plan you are eligible for and recommends the cheapest — which is sometimes the larger plan, and it will tell you why when it is.

Neither. The allowance is pooled across the whole contract year and it does not matter how you spend it. Eight thousand registrations could be eight events of a thousand, or twenty uneven ones, or two large ones and a dozen small — nothing resets monthly and nothing is reserved per event.

Yes, in both models, though the rate differs between them — the pricing page shows the current figure for each. Paying per event it comes off the event platform fee and the registrations; on an annual plan it comes off the plan's base price. It does not extend to annual overages, or to the mobile app where that is bought as a per-event add-on. There is no automatic verification behind it; we confirm eligibility together before anything is signed.

Then it needs a conversation rather than a number off a page. Past the limits on the pricing page — for a single event or for a year — we stop quoting instead of stretching the same figures to fit, because at that scale the shape of the operation changes enough that extrapolating would be guessing. Tell us what you are running and we will put together a tailored setup and a proposal for it.

Not currently. Cothena is set up with you so we can understand the event, configure the right starting point, and make sure your team is ready to use it before you depend on it operationally.

Yes. We help teams get their first event set up and understand how to structure their schedules, registration, roles and operational workflows. For teams that want more hands-on support, we can also discuss event coaching and done-with-you approaches.

Yes. We work closely with the teams using Cothena, and real operational needs help shape the product. If something is important to how you run events, we want to understand it.