Chapter 10 — Money Flow: who charges, who gets paid
Attend onboarding guide · ~5 min read · ↑ Back to contents
One last piece: the money. For every vendor, the ticket part is the same — Attend calls the vendor's checkout and the real ticket is delivered. What differs is who charges the fan's card and where the money lands. There are two models, and which one applies depends on the ticketing system.
The two models
Model A — the vendor takes the money. With TM Archtics and Tickets.com, Attend forwards the fan's card details to the vendor's checkout. The vendor charges the card, the money goes directly to the team, and the vendor handles refunds. Attend never touches the funds.
Model B — Attend takes the money. With TM Host and SeatGeek, the vendor only delivers the ticket; it doesn't take payment. So Attend charges the fan through Stripe, then remits to the team later (for example, monthly).
| Ticketing system | Who charges the fan | Where the money goes |
|---|---|---|
| TM Archtics | the vendor | straight to the team (vendor handles refunds) |
| Tickets.com | the vendor | straight to the team |
| TM Host | Attend, via Stripe | Attend remits to the team |
| SeatGeek | Attend, via Stripe | Attend remits to the team |
⚠️ Status note (V3 checkout): Only TM Archtics (vendor charges) and TM Host (Attend via Stripe) have an implemented checkout path in V3 — and TM Host runs only in pre-prod today (not yet in production — see Ch 25). Tickets.com is a real vendor classification but has no V3 fan-checkout integration yet (only a patron-lookup stub), and SeatGeek has none either. So the live, in-production money path today is TM Archtics (Model A).
Why you care
It means "how does payment work?" has two answers, and the right one depends entirely on which system the team is on. When you work on checkout, the first question is always: which ticketing system is this client using?
Example (illustrative — Host isn't in production yet): the Warriors are modeled on Ticketmaster Host, so when a fan buys a 3-game pack, Attend charges their card via Stripe and pays the Warriors later. A team on Archtics selling the exact same pack would have the vendor charge the fan and get paid directly.
(Naming aside: the PR_A-style codes from Chapters 7–8 are Attend's internal, Archtics-based names.
Every system — Host included — gets normalized to them, so a Host team like the Warriors still shows up
with Archtics-style codes in the code. The payment model and the code names are two separate things.)
Recap
- The ticket flow is identical for all vendors; only the money differs.
- TM Archtics & Tickets.com: the vendor charges the fan; money goes straight to the team.
- TM Host & SeatGeek: Attend charges via Stripe and remits to the team (Host in pre-prod, SeatGeek not yet integrated — Model A is the live path).
- On any checkout work, first ask which ticketing system the client uses.
You've got the foundation
That's the core of how Attend works, end to end:
- The business (Chapters 1–5): a B2B, white-label layer on top of ticketing systems that fills the gap between single-game and season tickets — Flex, Premium, Pass, Flow — set up per client through Cortex.
- The machinery (Chapters 6–10): every ticket is section/row/seat; class name controls access, price code + ticket type code set the price; seats are sold seat-hold-specific or best available; and money flows one of two ways.
With the business and the machinery in hand, Part 3 puts them together: how a team actually configures a Flex or Premium program — suites, packs, gating, credit — on top of everything you've just learned.