October Product Updates: Agenda Edits in One Window, Portable Check-In & More

Some of the most time-consuming parts of running an event are the small, repetitive ones.

Updating sessions one by one when the agenda shifts. Rebuilding a badge layout after an accidental edit. Setting exhibitor limits by hand after every booth sale. Creating a separate add-on for every t-shirt size. Sorting through a stack of applications to find the candidates worth meeting.

October’s updates take on that busywork, from planning your agenda to running the day itself. The goal is simple: less time fixing things, and more time running your event.

Let’s get into what’s new.

Build and Reshuffle Your Agenda in Minutes

Agenda changes are part of every event. A speaker drops out, a session moves to another slot, a new track gets added a week before doors open. Each change used to mean opening sessions one by one, keeping the rest of the schedule in your head, and hoping nothing clashed.

The rebuilt session setup brings that work into one place. The new worksheet view lets you edit multiple sessions in one window, so you can update times, tracks and speakers without opening a new tab for every change. Speaker clashes are flagged as you edit, and a change history lets you undo any edit if you need to go back.

Prefer a more visual view? The calendar view shows your whole agenda by day. Drag a session into a new slot to reschedule it, or reorder sessions within a track. Sessions also sort by start time automatically, so the order on your agenda always matches the clock.

Creating sessions is faster too. Your work autosaves as you go, and unfinished sessions wait in their own Drafts tab. You can create tracks, locations, polls and speakers right from the session you’re working on, without leaving it. For sessions with limited capacity, organizers can preassign seats, and each attendee gets an automatic email letting them know their spot is saved.

The result is an agenda you can build quickly and change confidently, right up to opening day. Want to see it in action? Watch the live walkthrough.

Build Badges to Exact Specs

Badges are often designed to a precise brief, set by the client or by the badge stock you’re printing on. A logo needs to be precisely 1.5 by 1.5 inches on a 3 by 4 badge. A name has to line up with a pre-printed stock. Then one accidental nudge from a teammate throws off a layout you spent an hour getting right.

The badge designer now has a ruler, so you can place and size every element to exact measurements. You can also set the width of a whole selection at once, instead of resizing elements one by one.

Once a layout is right, lock it. Locked elements can’t be moved or edited by mistake, so teammates can work on the rest of the badge without shifting what’s already done. You can also round the corners of elements for a softer, more polished look.

The new Barcode element generates a barcode from any registration form field you choose, such as an ID number, so you’re not limited to the default QR code. Note that these barcodes are meant for scanning with your own devices and can’t be scanned through the vFairs app.

The result is badges that print the way you designed them, every time, with less back-and-forth before your event.

Print Badges Anywhere Onsite with a Wireless Printer

Check-in is usually planned around how many attendees you expect and where they’ll arrive. On the day itself, it helps to have some flexibility: footfall can run higher than expected, or your team may find a different setup works more efficiently.

Portable badge printing lets you set up check-in wherever you need it. The portable printer connects to the vFairs badge printing app over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, so there’s no fixed station to plan around.

The flow takes three steps: connect the printer from the app, scan the attendee’s QR code, and their badge prints on the spot.

That gives your onsite team the option to add a check-in point when more attendees arrive than you planned for, or to set up wherever works best for them on the day. Watch how it works.

Sell Booths as Packages

Most organizers already sell exhibitor space in tiers. A standard booth, a booth with extra staff passes, a premium spot with more perks. But until now, each booth on the floor plan could carry only one price. Anything beyond that meant setting limits by hand in the backend after every sale.

You can now assign several tickets and add-ons to the same booth on your floor plan. When exhibitors click a booth, they see every package available for it and choose the one that suits them, for example, a 10×10 booth on its own or a 10×10 with two extra staff members.

Each package can also set how many staff an exhibitor can add. That limit applies everywhere exhibitors manage their team, including group registration, the exhibitor portal and team imports, so packages stay within what was purchased without anyone checking manually.

For organizers, that means more ways to sell the same space and less admin after every sale. For exhibitors, it means a clear choice of what they’re buying, right on the floor plan.

Review Speaker Applications Before They Reach Your Agenda

Not every speaker who applies ends up on stage. Organizers review credentials, check topics against the program, and turn some applications down. Until now, anyone who registered through the speaker registration form was added straight away, so that screening had to happen outside vFairs.

Speaker approval adds an optional review step. Organizers who want it turn on the approval toggle in their session settings. From then on, speakers who sign up through the speaker registration form appear in your speaker list as Pending, and you approve or reject each one from your dashboard. Their status updates as soon as you decide.

You can also keep speakers informed automatically. Turn on emails for each stage, under review, accepted and rejected, and they’ll go out every time a speaker’s status changes. The templates live in your system emails, and you can customize each one to match your event’s voice.

Organizers get a clear record of who’s been reviewed and decided, and speakers always know where their application stands.

Offer Add-on Variants with Built-in Taxes

Event merchandise rarely comes in one size. A conference t-shirt needs small through XL, a workshop kit might come in two editions, and each option has its own stock to track. Creating a separate add-on for every option clutters your registration form and makes inventory harder to follow.

Add-ons now support optional variants, such as size and color. Each variant can carry its own price change and its own stock count, so a 2XL shirt can cost a little more and sell out on its own schedule. Add-ons that don’t need variants work exactly as before. You can also make an add-on required, so attendees can’t complete checkout without it.

Taxes are simpler to set up too. Set a default tax rate for your whole event, then override it for any ticket or add-on with a custom rate, or mark it as inclusive, exclusive or tax-exempt. At checkout, attendees see a clear taxes and fees breakdown in their order summary.

You get accurate pricing and inventory in one place, and attendees know exactly what they’re paying before they confirm.

Give Employers AI-Matched Candidates

At a busy job fair, employers can end up with a long stack of applications. Sorting through them to find the handful worth meeting takes time away from the conversations they came for, and strong candidates can get lost in the pile.

AI Job Matchmaking matches candidates to each job based on criteria you set as the organizer, including your own custom registration fields. Employers see a list of best-fit candidates for every role they’ve posted.

From there, employers can add screening questions, review their matches, schedule meetings with candidates and export the list, all in one place. It replaces our earlier AI job recommendations with a more complete workflow, and it’s separate from the event matchmaking you may already use for networking.

Employers spend their time talking to the right people, candidates get in front of roles that fit them, and your fair becomes one employers want to come back to. For university career fairs, it means students meet the employers who are looking for their skills.

Minor Product Enhancements

Alongside the bigger updates, we’ve shipped a few smaller improvements worth knowing about.

• Meetings list view and availability settings: See all meetings at a glance in the new list view, and control when meetings can be booked. Match bookable hours to your event, set a recurring weekly schedule, or set availability day by day.
• Onsite app updates: Switch between events right in the onsite app, and mark attendees as inactive to leave them out of your analytics.
• Booth builder updates: Attendees can search a booth’s documents and videos by keyword, and our design team can now add curved 3D banners to booths.
• Floor plan in French: Exhibitors can now choose their booth on a floor plan in French.

These updates are live now in your vFairs dashboard. We’re continuing to build features that take the busywork out of planning and running your events, with more improvements on the way.

Got questions about any of these features or want to see them in action? Book a demo or contact your project manager.