The week after an event, most reports lead with one number: how many people came. It is the figure the sponsor asks for and the one that goes in the board pack. It is also the least useful number the front door recorded.
Every scan at the door is a timestamped record of who arrived, when, and through which entrance. Pulled together the week after, those records answer the questions that actually shape the next event: how many places to release, how many crew to roster, and when to open the doors.
Here are the five worth pulling, while the day is still fresh.
1. Registered against checked in
Start with the gap between the people who booked and the people who came. Not as a single headcount, but as a rate: checked in divided by registered.
That rate is the one number you can plan the next event around. PheedLoop's Event Data Lab looked at more than 860 events with both registration and check-in data and found a median no-show rate of around 28% for free events and around 17% for paid ones (Event Data Lab Report #06, 2026). Your own figure will sit somewhere near one of those, and it is far more useful than the benchmark, because it is your audience, your venue and your time of year.
Once you know it, you can release places with some confidence. If 30% of a free event's registrations do not arrive, a room for 200 can take more than 200 bookings. Just be honest about the margin, and keep a waitlist for the week you get it wrong. We covered how to run one in cancellations and a waitlist that works.
2. The arrival curve
Plot check-ins by the minute, or in five-minute buckets, from the moment the doors opened. Most events have the same shape: a slow start, a steep climb in the twenty minutes before the first session, then a long tail of late arrivals.
The useful part is where the peak fell and how steep it was. If 60% of your guests arrived in a fifteen-minute window, that window is what the door has to be staffed for, not the average across the morning. It tells you how many lanes you need next time and whether an earlier door time, or badge collection the night before, would flatten it. There is more on that in opening badge collection the night before.
3. Absent, by type of guest
Split the Absent list by ticket type or guest category. Speakers and sponsors almost always turn up. Free delegate places and complimentary tickets are usually where the gap is.
This is where the headline rate starts to earn its keep. If your paid delegates arrived at 85% and your complimentary guests at 50%, the answer for next year is not a bigger room. It might be a smaller comp allocation, a reminder closer to the day, or asking comp guests to confirm a week out.
4. Departed, and when
If you count people out as well as in, pull the Departed times. They tell you when the room thinned, which matters to anyone who spoke or exhibited in the afternoon.
A sponsor with a stand in the exhibition hall will want to know how many delegates were still in the building at three o'clock, not how many arrived at nine. If half had gone by the last session, that is worth knowing before you sell the same afternoon slot again. Counting people out, not just in covers how to record it without slowing the exit.
5. The desk itself
Finally, look at the door as an operation. How many walk-ups were registered on the day, how many passes were scanned twice, and how many guests had to be found by name because their code would not come up.
None of these is a failure on its own. A handful of walk-ups is normal. But a pattern tells you something: forty people searched by name usually means the joining email went to spam, or the pass was buried at the bottom of it. Fix that in the email, and next year's desk is faster without adding a single person to it.
Keep it short, and keep it
The report does not need to be long. One page with these five figures and a line on what you would change is enough, and it is far more likely to be read than a deck.
Two things to watch. Pull the numbers within a week, before the crew have forgotten why the second entrance was busy at ten. And keep only what you need: aggregate figures are fine to keep indefinitely, but the personal data behind them should follow your retention policy, not linger in a spreadsheet on someone's laptop. What attendee data you should, and shouldn't, keep goes through that in more detail.
CheckInHub records every check-in as Registered, Checked in, Departed or Absent, with the time and the entrance, at checkinhub.co.uk, so the numbers are there the moment the doors close.
