Core Concepts

A handful of words in Fairground 360 mean something specific. Getting them straight early saves a lot of confusion later — particularly the two different things called "deposit".

Account

Your organization. Everything — renters, bookings, invoices, events, entries, vendors, files — belongs to exactly one account, and nothing is ever visible across accounts.

One person can belong to several accounts (a consultant working with three fairgrounds, say). The account switcher sits at the top of the sidebar; switching accounts reloads the app in that account's data with your role there.

View mode (the two sides)

An account has two operating contexts: Rentals and Fairground. The switcher at the top of the sidebar moves you between them, and each one has its own navigation, its own dashboard, and its own dashboard widget layout saved per person.

What is shared across both sides:

• The account itself, its identity, and its logo
• The team and their permissions
• Documents, notes, and the activity log
• Notification templates and the outbound email log
• The Stripe connection registry

What is not shared: the nav, the dashboard, and the records themselves. A booking lives on the Rentals side; an event lives on the Fairground side.

Your account has a default view mode — the side that loads when you log in. Set it in Settings → General.

Actors: two kinds of login

Actor	Logs in at	Used for
Staff user	The admin app	Running the account — everything in these docs unless stated otherwise
Portal contact	The renter / vendor / exhibitor portal	The other side of a relationship: signing, paying, uploading, entering

These are genuinely separate systems, not two roles on one login. A renter is not a staff user with limited access — they are a different record with a different login, and they never see your admin app.

Government reviewers are the exception. A county permitting officer is a staff user with the Government role, which corrals them onto a single read-only page. They log in the way your team does, but they see one list and nothing else. See Government Portal.

Staff roles

Team members get per-side access, so a bookkeeper can have full run of Rentals and no access to Fairground at all.

• Rentals role — full, edit, view, limited, or none
• Fairground role — full, edit, view, or none
• Global permissions — manage team, manage billing, manage settings

There is also a top-level role (owner, admin, manager, staff, view only, accountant, government) that sets the sensible default for the flags above. See Team & Roles.

Renter

The organization or person who rents from you. Renters are the backbone of the Rentals side: bookings, invoices, payments, documents, and portal logins all hang off a renter record.

A renter can be an individual, an organization, a government body, or a nonprofit, and is classified as recurring (the 4-H club that books the same weekend every year) or non-recurring.

A renter can have several portal contacts — the club president who signs and the treasurer who pays can each have their own login under one renter.

Booking

A booking is the rental contract, not just a calendar entry. One booking carries:

• Dates — a single date range, or many occurrences for a recurring booking
• Setup and teardown windows, optionally charged
• Line items — spaces and add-ons, priced separately
• An agreement rendered from one of your contract templates
• One or more signatures
• An optional booking deposit and an optional security deposit
• A task checklist
• A linked invoice

See Bookings for the full anatomy.

The two deposits

This is the one that trips people up. They are different features with different money.

	Booking deposit	Security deposit
What it is	A down payment against the rental fee	A refundable damage deposit
Typical size	A percentage of the total (25% by default)	A flat amount
When it is taken	At signing, on the public signing page	At signing or on the invoice, or held on a card near the event
Where it goes	Recorded as a payment against the invoice — it reduces the balance	Held separately; it is not revenue
What happens after	Nothing; it is part of what they owed	Returned, partly returned, or forfeited after the event

See Security Deposits for hold mode versus collected mode.

Space and add-on

• A space is a rentable part of your grounds: the exhibition hall, the arena, the pavilion. Spaces carry capacities, amenities, hourly and daily rates, a calendar color, and a status (including maintenance, which keeps them off the booking form without deleting them).
• An add-on is a rentable extra: tables, chairs, a PA system, electricity hookup, a cleaning service. Add-ons price per item or per hour and can carry a finite quantity, which is checked against overlapping bookings.

Invoice and payment

An invoice is what someone owes. Every invoice belongs to a context — rental on the Rentals side, or vendor, sponsor, entertainment, ticket on the Fairground side — and the same invoice engine serves all of them.

A payment is always attached to an invoice. Payments can be card, bank transfer (ACH), card-present (a card reader at the office), check, cash, or other. A single invoice commonly carries several.

Context and the Stripe connection

Because a fair board and a rental operation often settle to different bank accounts, an account can connect more than one Stripe account, and each side designates one active connection at a time.

Every flow that takes money resolves its connection from the record's context — rentals bookings and invoices always use the rentals connection, vendor and ticket money uses the fairground connection. You never pick a Stripe account manually at payment time; you assign them once in Settings → Payments & Stripe.

Event

On the Fairground side, an event is the container everything parents to: the 2026 County Fair, Christmas on the Midway. An account runs several at once, and each event has its own module toggles — turn off ticketing for the Christmas show and it disappears from that event's nav entirely.

Entry, exhibitor, and the catalog

• The catalog is the four-level structure entries are made against: Division → Department → Section → Class. Fees, premiums, and rules can attach at every level.
• An exhibitor is a person who enters. Exhibitors live at the account level, so their exhibitor number persists year over year.
• An entry is one exhibitor's item in one class. It carries a QR code and a reference code, and is judged anonymously by number.

Documents, notes, and activity

Three systems that attach to almost any record:

• Documents — uploaded files with a type (insurance/COI, permit, license, contract, other), an expiration date, and an approval state. A document can be uploaded by staff or by the renter through their portal, and can satisfy a task that requires one.
• Notes — free-form, threaded, and pinnable. Pinned notes surface on the record's Overview.
• Activity — the audit trail. Field changes, emails sent, portal logins, signatures, and payments all land here, and you cannot edit it.

Timezones

Everything is stored in UTC and displayed in your account's timezone — not each person's, and not the server's. Set it once in Settings → General and every date on every screen, email, and reminder follows it.

"Today", overdue checks, and reminder scheduling are all computed in your account's local time, so an 8am reminder goes out at 8am where you are.

Date-only fields — a due date, an event date — have no timezone at all and never shift.