How to generate event attendance and ticket sales reports in WordPress

Decide whether your report should show registrations, tickets sold, paid bookings, verified bookings, or people who actually checked in. These are different figures. A sold ticket is not proof that someone attended, so actual attendance requires check-in data or another attendance field.

Choose the reporting period, events, ticket types, payment statuses, and columns you need before exporting anything.

Open your event plugin’s booking, registration, or attendee area and select the event and occurrence you need. Review the attendee names, ticket quantities, booking status, payment status, price, and any check-in value recorded by the plugin. In Modern Events Calendar, event bookings can include attendee names, email addresses, transaction IDs, and purchase amounts.

For a quick headcount, some event systems provide an attendee report or notification. MEC’s attendee report shows the total attendees for the current booking, but it is a booking summary rather than proof that every ticket holder arrived.

Use the booking or attendee export supplied by your event plugin. In MEC, the booking tools can export booking data, while the export-and-purge tool sends older records as a CSV and leaves WooCommerce orders untouched. Do not use the purge option until you have checked and backed up the exported file.

Open the CSV in a spreadsheet and filter out cancelled, rejected, refunded, or pending records according to your reporting rules. Sum ticket quantities for sales, then count checked-in records separately for attendance. Keep the original export unchanged so you can reconcile figures later.

If tickets are WooCommerce products, compare the event-plugin booking export with WooCommerce orders. Filter orders by the event ticket product, date range, and a paid or completed status, then compare order quantities and net sales with the booking data.

Do not count orders alone as attendance. One order can contain several tickets, and a refunded or cancelled order may still appear in an export. WooCommerce Box Office, for example, provides ticket-holder CSV exports and a report showing total tickets sold by event or product.

Create a summary with at least these figures: tickets sold, paid tickets, free tickets, cancelled or refunded tickets, gross sales, discounts, fees, net sales, registered attendees, and checked-in attendees. Add a separate line for unknown or missing check-in values instead of treating them as attended.

For recurring events, group the data by occurrence date. This prevents one event series from hiding a poorly attended date and makes staffing and capacity decisions easier.

For occasional events, the manual export route is usually sufficient. If you regularly compare events, payment methods, organisers, categories, locations, or date ranges, install MEC Advanced Reports Addon alongside MEC Pro. Its reporting screen supports filters, attendee lists, booking and income statistics, charts, and CSV, XML, JSON, and PDF exports.

Open the report, set the date and event filters, check the booking statuses included, review the attendee list, and export the filtered result. The important Friday-afternoon check is to confirm that your filters have not excluded recent bookings and that the report is measuring bookings or check-ins as intended.