Before you start using Event Temple, it’s critical to complete the initial setup. Why? Because a well-configured system lays the foundation for success: it ensures accurate reporting, smooth team collaboration, and a seamless client experience. Without proper setup, you risk misaligned data, manual workarounds, and missed revenue opportunities. Taking the time to set things up right from the start empowers your team to hit the ground running and get the most value out of Event Temple.
Prefer to follow along with a video? Watch our Setup Masterclass here!
Step 1: Personal Settings
Navigate to Personal Settings > User Profile. Update your name, title, contact info, and upload a profile photo for a polished, professional appearance on documents and emails.
Link your Outlook or Google account under Personal Settings > Email. This ensures email communication is logged within the system for full visibility. Make sure each user adds their signature here as well.
Sync your Google, Outlook, Office 365, or Exchange calendar under Personal Settings > Calendar Integration to push confirmed bookings into your personal calendar. This improves visibility, reduces double bookings, and saves manual entry.
Step 2: Fields & Categories
Set up categories like Food, Beverage, AV, Setup, Miscellaneous, Room Rental so they link correctly to menu items and feed into reporting. Use this guide to understand how you can
Track where business is coming from: Website, Client Referral, Repeat Business, Social Media, Marketing Campaign.
Document why business was lost: Dates Not Available, Pricing, No Response, Chose Competitor. This feeds into reporting and improves pipeline strategy.
Define types like Meeting, Wedding, Corporate, Sports Group, Tour, Holiday Party, Birthday Party, Prom
Define types like Meeting, Breakfast, Lunch, Coffee Break, Reception, Dinner, Ceremony, Registration, Tear Down, Set up.
Setup Style examples are Theater, Classroom, Rounds of 8, Rounds of 6, Banquet.
Examples:
Account Types: Oil & Gas, Banking, Consulting, Retail, Non-Profit, Government, Wedding Planner.
Market Segments: Corporate, SMERF (Social, Military, Educational, Religious, Fraternal), Leisure, Government, Group, Crew.
Add hotel-specific fields (VIP status, dietary notes) to capture extra data on accounts, events, or room blocks.
Step 3: Organization Setup
This sets the foundation for system-wide documents and workflows.
Add hotel name, address, phone, and logo to populate contracts, BEOs, and invoices. General settings guide.
Invite your team, assigning Admin, Regular, or Read-Only permissions depending on their needs. Set security carefully!
Define invoice terms (Net 30, Net 60), prefixes (like INV-), taxes, fees, and other financial details.
Set up taxes such as service charges, gratuities, VAT, and any applicable fees like delivery or setup fees. Ensure the percentages, amounts, and labels align with local regulations and your hotel's internal policies. This step guarantees accurate calculations on invoices, proposals, and contracts. More on taxes.
Configure your sales pipeline stages (e.g., Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Contract Sent, Confirmed, Actual) to match your hotel’s sales process. This helps your team track the status of each piece of business, forecast revenue, and prioritize follow-ups. You can customize pipeline stages and assign deals to the correct stage to keep everything moving efficiently. Pipeline setup guide.
✅ Spaces
List all event spaces, ballrooms, boardrooms, and meeting rooms. Define their capacities, description and associated rental charges (if any). This helps the team manage space availability and bookings accurately. Spaces guide.
✅ Rooms
Set up hotel room types, including room names (e.g., Standard Queen, Deluxe King, Suite) and detailed descriptions of each.
✅ Menus
Input all food, beverage, AV, rental, and miscellaneous items into the system. Organize them under sub-menus for clarity (e.g., Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Coffee Break, Reception). Make sure to assign the items a revenue category, as it flows to reporting. Menus guide.
Before setting up menu items, make sure your Revenue Categories are fully configured and aligned with your hotel’s accounting system — this ensures revenue flows into the right buckets, keeps your finance team happy, and avoids a situation where you have lots of revenue but no clarity on where it belongs. Once categories are set, go to Settings > Menus to add your food, beverage, AV, rental, and miscellaneous items, organizing them under clear sub-menus (like Breakfast, Lunch, Coffee Break) and assigning the correct revenue category and taxes so reporting, invoices, and financial tracking stay accurate
✅ Packages
Once menus are built, create combined packages like an All-Day Meeting Package, Wedding Package, or Holiday Party Bundle. Packages group menus and pricing together for simplified quoting. Packages guide.
Before setting up Packages, make sure your Menu Items are fully built out and review your Event Types — these are essential foundations before you can begin building and testing Packages! A typical Day Delegate Rate (DDR) package, for example, bundles multiple events like a morning coffee break, lunch, and afternoon coffee into a single quote, but behind the scenes, each activity needs to be set up as a separate event within the booking, each with the correct Event Type — this logic is central to Event Temple, not just for Packages but for all bookings, ensuring clear internal and external communication about when, where, and what is happening. When creating a Package, be sure to add a detailed description to clarify what’s included, and as you create the events within it, use a tip like ending default times with “#1” for clarity, then add menu items as per person or flat rates depending on the charge type. Once your Package is ready, adding it to a booking dramatically speeds things up, allowing you to apply multiple events, menus, and pricing in just a few clicks — a huge time-saver compared to building everything piece by piece!
✅ Budgets
Set monthly targets for Catering and Groups.
Feel free to modify existing workflow templates to align with your organizations.
Step 4: Tools & Templates
Create reusable email templates for proposals, contracts and follow-ups. Use placeholders to auto-fill client and event details.
Standardize proposal, contract, BEO and Group Resumes by cloning Event Temple defaults and adding your hotel’s branding, terms, and layout preferences.
Set up web forms for your website to collect leads directly into Event Temple. This improves lead management and reduces data entry.
Activate guest portal and add hotel's website and a photo.
Step 5: Integrations
(Optional)
✅ Integrations
PMS, Stripe Payments, Webhooks and other add-ons can enhance workflows, payment collection, and reporting.
Pro Tips
✅ Complete all admin setup before adding users to avoid confusion.
✅ Double-check taxes, categories, and field setups before going live.
✅ Start with a simple sales pipeline; expand as the team gains confidence.
✅ Attend regular check-ins with your Customer Success Manager for best practices.
✅ Review latest product updates by clicking on 
in Event Temple.
Support & Next Steps
✅ Schedule live team training sessions or sign up for Insight Sessions.
✅ Use the Help Center and in-app chat for ongoing support.
✅ Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for custom strategies, account questions, or rollout support.