Real setup, names changed
A 2,000-delegate medical conference run from Google Sheets
Medical association running an annual scientific conference · Google Sheets add-on
The Gulf Wound Care Society (name changed) runs an annual conference that has grown from a few hundred delegates to well over two thousand, plus hands-on workshops around the main event. Registration lives where the organizing committee already works: a Google Sheet.
The situation
Registrations come from several sources — an online form, sponsor allocations, speaker lists — and all end up as rows in one spreadsheet. Every delegate needs a personalized QR badge, and the committee needs to know attendance numbers for accreditation.
Workshops are separate, smaller events with their own capacity limits, so they cannot share the main conference's guest list.
The setup
Bulk ticket generation for thousands of rows
Tickets are generated for the whole sheet in one run, then sent by email in batches. New late registrations get tickets automatically as rows are added.
Guides: Send tickets by email · Send tickets automatically for new rows · When tickets wait because of the daily email limit
A badge-style ticket design
The ticket shows the delegate's name, title, and institution — it doubles as a name badge on a phone, and the design is reused every year with only the dates changed.
Guide: Change how your ticket looks
Several scanners at the entrance
Three staff scan simultaneously at peak arrival time. Every scan is written back to the sheet with a timestamp, so the committee watches arrival numbers live.
Guides: Let your team scan tickets too · See who came and export your reports
Separate projects for workshops
Each satellite workshop is its own copied sheet with its own tickets and its own capacity — a delegate's conference badge does not open a workshop door.
What happened
Four editions in, the recipe is stable: the committee reuses last year's sheet, replaces the list, and registration is live in an afternoon.
With per-attendee pricing, the conference budget line is simply the delegate count — easy to put in front of a board for approval, with a printable quote for procurement.
Features used in this example
More examples
Next step
Set up the same thing for your event
Free for your first 10 attendees. After that, pricing is per attendee — and unused check-ins never expire.