Access control and accreditation
How EventNexus decides who gets on site, where they can go, and what they're entitled to.
Accreditation is the part of the festival nobody notices when it works. Everyone who is not a paying ticket holder — crew, artists, touring parties, suppliers, volunteers, guests, contractors — needs to be accounted for, given the right level of access, and handed something at the gate that proves it.
EventNexus handles that as one system rather than a stack of spreadsheets.
One register for everyone on site
The central idea is simple. Every person who needs site access, wherever their request originated, ends up as a record in a single accreditation register.
That matters because the alternative is what most festivals live with: a crew spreadsheet, an artist advance document, a separate guestlist, a volunteer list, and no single place to answer "how many people are we actually expecting on Friday?"
Because it is one register, you get one number, one approvals queue, and one collection desk.
Where records come from
You rarely create accreditation records by hand. They arrive automatically from the module where the request was made:
Crew Logistics — supplier and contractor crew, added by the supplier themselves or by your team
Artist Logistics — touring party members and artist guestlist spots
Guestlist Hub — internal and industry guest requests
Accessibility Hub — approved applicants and their personal assistants
Volunteer Hub — volunteers, once they're approved and their deposit is settled
Parking requests — vehicle access for anyone who needs to drive on
Manual entry — the late additions that every festival has
Each record remembers where it came from. When someone in Crew Logistics changes a crew member's pass type, the accreditation record follows; you are not maintaining the same person twice.
The building blocks
Three things define what access actually means at your festival. You set these up once, before anyone is accredited.
Access zones
The areas of your site that need controlling — backstage, production compound, artist area, VIP, working areas. Each zone has a name, a description and a colour, and the colour carries through to your passes so stewards can read them at a glance.
Pass types
A pass type is a named level of access, and it is where the zones get attached. A pass type also carries:
Which zones it opens — the core of what it grants
Catering entitlement — whether the holder eats, and which meals
Parking — whether the pass type is a parking pass
Guestlist availability — whether it can be assigned to guestlist requests
A total allocation — your ceiling for that pass type across the festival
A colour — used on passes, reports and the collection desk
Pass types can be retired without being deleted, so last year's structure stays intact in your records.
Allocations
Allocations are how you hand control to suppliers without losing control of numbers. You allocate a quantity of a pass type to an organisation — twenty Crew passes to your staging contractor, say — and they manage their own crew list within that limit. The system tracks what they've used and what's left, and it won't let them exceed it.
How a record moves
Every accreditation record moves through a small, predictable set of states.
Pending — submitted, waiting on your team. This is what fills the approvals queue.
Approved — your team has signed it off. The person is cleared, and a pass is issued against their record.
Rejected — declined, with a reason attached so the requester knows what to fix. Rejections are not dead ends; the record can be corrected and resubmitted.
Collected — the physical pass has been handed over at the collection desk.
Void — the pass has been cancelled. This is what you use for a lost wristband or a crew change: the old pass stops being valid and a new one is issued in its place, with the history preserved.
Nothing is deleted along the way. If a question comes up after the festival about who was on site and who cleared them, the answer is still there.
People, not rows
One person often appears several times. A stage manager might be crew for one supplier, on the guestlist for the Saturday, and driving on with a parking pass.
EventNexus links those records to a single person, and gives that person a code — a short identifier with a scannable QR behind it. That code is what makes it possible to ask "what does this individual actually hold?" rather than trawling four lists.
It also means duplicates are visible. When the same person is entered twice under slightly different spellings or two email addresses, the system flags the pair so your team can merge them into one identity, without losing either record's history.
What people actually carry
A pass is the credential itself — the thing that gets scanned. Each one has its own token and QR code and is tied to a specific person.
Most people hold an access pass, which is the one that opens zones. Some also hold a catering pass, which is issued separately and states the entitlement plainly — the dates, the meals, the allowance — so both the holder and the catering team can read it without looking anything up. Parking works the same way, as its own pass held by the person who is driving.
Passes are per person, not per group and not per vehicle. A parking pass belongs to a named driver, not to a van, which is why it can't quietly change hands halfway through build week.
On site
The collection desk is where all of this becomes real. Your team searches for someone by name, email, phone, organisation or QR scan, confirms who they are, and issues the pass.
Only approved people appear. Anyone still pending or rejected won't come up, which means the decision about whether someone gets a pass was made in advance, by the right person, and not at a gate at 7am with a queue building.
Who can see what
Accreditation is permission-controlled tab by tab. Someone running the collection desk sees collection. Someone approving credentials sees the approvals queue. Suppliers see their own crew and their own allocation, and nothing else.
This is deliberate. Accreditation data includes personal details for hundreds of people, and access to it should match the job someone is doing.
What it isn't
Accreditation is not public ticketing. It does not sell tickets, and it does not handle your paying audience. It covers everyone who works, performs, supports or is hosted at the event — the people who need to be on site rather than the people who bought their way in.
Where to go next
Pass types and access zones — setting up the structure before accreditation opens
Allocating passes — giving suppliers control of their own crew lists
Credential approvals — working the approvals queue
Collection on site — running the desk on the day