Creating one
Events, then create. A title, a start, and an end.
The end matters more than people expect. It is what decides whether an event is upcoming or past on every surface that lists them, including your public website. An event with no end never stops being upcoming.
Each event gets a slug for its public URL, unique within your organization, derived from the title unless you set one.
Registration
Members register from the portal. Non-members can register through the events widget on your own site, if you have put one there.
A registration can be cancelled, by the member from their portal or by you from the event.
Paid events
A paid registration produces an invoice line of type event, so it settles the same way dues do and lands in the same reporting. Tax is applied according to what your organization has said is taxable, which can differ between a lunch and a membership. See tax and document numbers.
Check-in
Open the event on a phone at the door and check people in. It records who arrived, which is the difference between knowing how many registered and knowing how many came.
That number is worth having. Registration counts flatter every event; attendance counts tell you which ones to run again.
Editing and deleting
You can edit an event. You cannot casually delete one that has live registrations, because people have committed to being somewhere and the record of that commitment is the point. Cancel the registrations first, deliberately, and the deletion is then something you meant.
Capacity
Set a capacity and Sembr enforces it. Leave it empty and the event is unlimited.
The count is of seats actually occupied, which means registered, checked in, and waitlisted. A cancelled registration gives its seat back.
This is enforced as a system-level rule rather than as a check in one screen. That distinction matters: a member registering from their own portal can only see their own records, and a naive seat count run in that context would only ever count their own registration and let the event overfill. Sembr counts every seat regardless of who is asking, while still keeping one organization's events invisible to another's.
Waitlisting
A registration can hold a waitlisted status, and a waitlisted member holds a seat against capacity.
Promotion off the waitlist is a decision you make, not something that happens on its own when somebody cancels. If you want the next person in, move them.
What is not built
Ticket types. One price per event. If you need member and non-member pricing on the same event, run it as two events, or invoice the difference separately.