How to Use Seating in zkipster

An overview on how to plan and manage your event floor plan with zkipster

Murilo Aguiar avatar
Written by Murilo Aguiar
Updated over a week ago

With the zkipster Seating feature, it is possible to design and manage one or more floor plans on the same zkipster event. The seating charts are available on the browser and on the zkipster mobile app for compatible iOS and Android tablets.

In summary, this article gives you an overview on how to:

Please note: the Seating feature is only available on the Professional and Enterprise plan levels. If you would like to upgrade your subscription, please check out this article here or reach out to support@zkipster.com.

Allowing Guests to be Seated in Multiple Floor Plans

If your event requires more than one floor plan, you have the option to define if your guests can be seated in just one of the floor plans or in multiple floor plans.

For example, if your event's lunch will happen in room A and the dinner will happen in room B, you might have guests that will attend both.

In order to be able to seat the same guest in different floor plans, you need to make sure that the 'Allow guests to be seated in more than one floorplan' checkbox is selected on your event's settings:

If you unselect this checkbox while you have guests already seated in multiple floorplans, a pop up message will be displayed warning you that all guests seated on more than one floorplan will be unseated:

You can learn more about how to edit your event settings via this article here.

Creating and Duplicating Floorplans

By default, a floorplan will already be available when you create an event - you just need to click on the 'Seating' section from the left hand side menu to access it.

Clicking on the floorplan name from the top left of the screen will allow you to add more floorplans to your event:

You can name your floorplans and include a description for your team's reference. You can also link floorplans to existing sessions in your event - this functionality is explained a bit further down this article.

If you want to duplicate an existing floorplan, you can follow the steps below:

- Open the floorplan navigation tab by clicking on the floorplan name from the top left;

- Hover the mouse on top of the floorplan thumbnail;
- Click on the three dots icon;

- Click on 'Duplicate'.

You can read more about how to create, duplicate or delete floorplans via this article here.

Uploading your Floorplan Image

zkipster allows you to upload your own floor plan image, which will then sit as a background image on your seating chart for you to overlay the zkipster tables on. However, you can also leave the background blank and just work with the zkipster tables as is.

To upload a floor plan image, simply click on the 'Upload Floor Plan' button as shown below and attach your file:

You can learn more details about how to upload your floor plan image here.

Designing your Seating Chart

From the 'Tables & Seats' section of the seating feature, you are able to design your seating chart by using the table and seat options available on the right hand side.

Click on top of the table, row or focal point to drag and drop them to the desired position in your seating chart.

Click on top of the table to further customize it, by setting up a label, name, number of seats and so on. You can learn all the different ways you can customize your table via this article here.

Seating Guests Automatically

It is possible to automatically seat confirmed guests when importing your guest list spreadsheet file.

To achieve that, a few things should be correctly configured:

  • All tables and seats should be added to your seating plan before the spreadsheet upload.

  • The spreadsheet columns' headers need to follow the convention "[Floorplan Name] Table Label" and "[Floorplan Name] Seat Label".

  • Guests need to be assigned with both a Table Label and a Seat Label or Table Name and Seat Label, so the system knows exactly where the guest should be seated.

  • Seat Label must account for additional guests (1+s are always seated automatically next to the main guest).

You can find detailed information on how to format your spreadsheet in order to seat your guests automatically via this article here.

Seating guests individually

Once the Tables and Seats have been set on the floor plan, the next step would be seating guests or groups of guests:

  1. Click and hold the guest to be seated from the right hand side menu

  2. Drag and drop the guest to the seat where they will be seated in


Please note: +1 guests are seated directly to the right or left of the Main Guest depending on the seating direction one step back in the table configuration. Currently, it is not possible to separate +1s from the Main Guest.

Clicking on a guest on the seating plan gives you the option to unseat that guest.

Pro-tip: You can also click on the table label to add/remove and filter by table.

Linking Floor Plans to Sessions

It is possible to link a session to a floor plan to make it easier to seat guests assigned to a specific session. For example, if you have a VIP Reception session in your event, you can create a floor plan for this reception and link the session to it by clicking on the three dots icon located on the floor plan thumbnail and clicking on 'Edit'.

Under the 'Link To Session' dropdown menu, select the sessions you want to link to that floor plan.

When it is time to seat your guests, only the guests that are part of that session's guest list will show up on the right hand side of the floor plan:

Viewing Seating Details on the Guest List

You can enable the 'Seating' column on your guest list in order to view your guests' seating details without having to access each individual guest profile.

Click on the three bars icon located on the top left of the guest list and select the 'Seating' field and the 'Seating Color' field if necessary. You can also drag and drop the field in the position you want the column to be displayed:

If your guests are seated in multiple floor plans, you can view their seating details for each floor plan by hovering the mouse on top of the 'Seating' field.

Please Note: the changes you make to the guest list view only apply to the browser version of zkipster. To adjust the guest fields for the app version, please refer to this article.

Printing your Seating Chart

From the right side of the 'Overview & Printing' screen inside your floor plan, you can choose what you wish to view on the floor plan, as well as what you wish to see when you click on 'Create PDF' at the bottom.

Clicking on 'Create PDF' or 'More PDF Options' allows you to export your seating chart as pdf. file if you need to print it. You can export a full overview of the floor plan, individual tables or a guest list with the seating details.

Learn more about how to print your seating chart via this article here.

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