In most shows it is three tools and a spreadsheet. A form tool collects the applications, the jury scores them in a shared sheet, and the booth invoices are raised somewhere else again. It works, and the cost is paid in your team's evenings rather than on an invoice.
The pattern is consistent enough to write down. Applications open for a window, close, get scored, get ranked, and the top of the list is offered space until the hall is full.
The usual run of it
- A form collects business details, work samples, trading information and the booth size requested
- Somebody exports the responses to a sheet, because the form tool cannot rank anything
- Jurors score in their own columns, and a person averages them and arbitrates the splits
- Accepted applicants are emailed by hand, and the waitlist is kept on a second tab
- Booth allocation happens on a hall map drawn somewhere else entirely
- Invoices go out from the accounting system, and payment is chased against the sheet
- Booth staff badges are collected by email, late, from people accepted weeks earlier
Every join between those steps is a person retyping something, and each is where a duplicate application, a missed acceptance or a booth promised twice comes from.
Where the cost actually sits
The form tool is often priced by response, so a popular call for artists costs more than a quiet one and a show is charged for its own appeal. That is the visible part, and usually the smaller part.
The real cost is in the hand-offs. The gap between the jury finishing and offers going out is time in which artists are waiting, and some accept a table at another show instead. Being slow there is a tooling problem, not a judgement one. The second cost is duplicated data: one person exists as an application, a booth, an invoice and a badge, in four places that do not agree.
What a jury round needs from software
- Blind or attributed scoring, whichever your rules require, with every juror seeing the same criteria
- Work samples viewable in the scoring screen rather than as links opened one at a time
- Returning exhibitors flagged, along with any history your team records about them
- A ranked list with ties visible, and a place to record why an exception was made
- Offers with acceptance deadlines, and automatic promotion from the waitlist when one lapses
- Booth allocation on the hall map, with power, corner and neighbour constraints recorded against the space
- Booth staff badges attached to the booth rather than collected from somebody's inbox
None of that is exotic. It is a form, a scoring screen, a ranked list, a map and an invoice, joined up so that an acceptance creates the booth, the invoice and the badge allocation in one action instead of three.
Why it matters beyond the weekend
The dealers and artists who applied, accepted or not, are the list you invite next year. Spread across a form tool, a spreadsheet and an email account, that list is only as good as whoever still has the logins. Held in one place with their history, it makes the next call for applications easier than the last.
What we leave alone
Card processing stays with your processor, whoever raises the invoice. Where the venue or the hall requires particular insurance, licensing or a fire-safety sign-off, those requirements stand and anything built has to fit around them. Hotel room blocks stay with the hotels and the housing bureau.
Whether it is worth replacing
Add the application form tool to the badge platform, the programming tool, the bracket platform and the volunteer scheduler over a full year, in our free software bill calculator, and look at the three-year figure rather than the monthly one.
If the total is small, stay where you are, and our guide to renting versus owning your software explains when that stops being the right answer. Hiro rebuilds the parts a show really uses, running beside the old tools until they are proven, for one flat monthly price. The page for conventions and esports organisers sets out what is commonly rented and what can be owned.