A regular cash sale still needs Noctern to price the ticket and mint it. If the venue's network goes down mid-show, that's not possible — so for events where connectivity is a known risk, a venue admin can hold a block of tickets on your device before doors. Once that block is on the device, you can keep selling and printing from it with no connection at all.
Before doors: a block of tickets is held for your device
This is set up by a venue admin from the web admin, on the Box Office → Holds page (the "Seat Holds" tab) — "Prepare device for offline." You don't need to do anything on the device to receive it; it shows up automatically the next time the app syncs.
The held block — either a quantity of general-admission tickets in a tier, or a specific set of seats — is taken out of the pool everyone else can sell from the moment it's created. Nobody else, online or on another device, can sell those same seats or that GA quantity while your device holds them.
While offline: sell from the block, print immediately
Every ticket in the block already has its price, seat/section, and QR code fixed — nothing about a sale needs a live connection. When you sell one:
- Enter the patron's name (and email, if they want a receipt later) and take payment same as any cash sale.
- The ticket prints immediately from the block, using the layout downloaded with the block itself.
- If a ticket needs to be given away instead of sold (a comp), the sale records $0 collected, but the ticket still exists and can still be scanned at the door.
The amount you collect must match the ticket's price + tax exactly — there's no discounting or promo codes on an offline sale. If a patron needs a different price, sell them a regular ticket once the network is back instead.
Day-of-show upcharge still applies, automatically
If the venue has a day-of-show upcharge turned on, it's already baked into the block's tickets when your device downloads them — you don't do anything differently. Each ticket already knows its own upcharge amount (or $0.00 if its tier is exempt) and exactly when that amount starts applying, so a ticket held in the block well before doors is still charged correctly if you don't actually sell it until after the day-of-show cutoff. The amount you collect must include the upcharge from that point on — same as the warning above, Noctern checks the total server-side once the sale uploads.
The box office's "pencil" waiver for the day-of-show upcharge is not available offline. If a patron has a reason the upcharge shouldn't apply, sell them a regular ticket once the network is back instead of a comp — a comp still records the full price (including the upcharge) as given away, it doesn't waive it.
Back online: sales upload automatically
Once the device reconnects, every offline sale from the block uploads to Noctern in the background, the same way offline check-ins do. This is safe to run more than once — a sale that already made it through isn't recorded twice.
If two orders somehow reference the same held ticket (shouldn't happen in normal use, but a bug or a very unlucky retry could), only the first one to reach Noctern wins — the second is rejected, never double-sold.
What happens to tickets left unsold
If the block still has tickets left in it at the end of the night (or a venue admin decides the device won't need it after all), a venue admin releases the remainder from the web admin. Anything still unsold goes straight back into the pool for everyone else to sell — nothing is lost, and nothing you already sold from that block is affected.
From the web admin, open AdminBox OfficeHolds, choose the event, and look at the Prepare device for offline card to see any allocations currently held for a device.