Hosted Buyers

Who this is for: whoever runs the buyer programme for an event — an organiser, a matchmaking lead, an exhibitor-relations manager. No technical knowledge is assumed.

What it does: pairs your hosted buyers with the exhibitors most worth their time, places those meetings on a timetable, and sends each side their itinerary.

How long it takes: about twenty minutes of setup, plus however long you want to spend reviewing the pairings before you publish them.

This is the shareable copy of the guide built into the Command Centre. In the product it lives behind the Guide button in the Hosted Buyers page header, on all three steps — the same walkthrough, the same screenshots, opening at the section for the step you are on. Use that version if you have access to it; this page is the same guide, for anyone without a Command Centre login.

Every screenshot here is a real screen. This guide was written by walking the whole flow end to end in a browser on a demo event (10 hosted buyers, 13 exhibitors) and photographing each state as it happened — including the failures. Nothing is a mock-up. Your numbers will differ; the screens will not.

Where it lives

Command Centre → pick your event → GROW → Hosted Buyers (item 10 in the left rail).

The page is three steps, and the stepper at the top is both a map and a set of links — every step is clickable at any time, in any order. Going back never loses anything.

Each step carries its own live summary, so the stepper answers "where am I up to?" without you opening anything:

Two buttons sit in the page header, on all three steps:

• Export schedule — downloads every meeting as a CSV: hosted buyer, company, exhibitor, date/time, location, status. Removed meetings are left out. (Verified: produces a real file, one row per meeting, with a header row.)
• Add participant — a shortcut that jumps to Step 1 and opens the hosted-buyer picker.

Both are greyed out until a programme exists.

Step 0 — Create the programme

The first time you open Hosted Buyers for an event, there is nothing there yet.

Press Create programme. That is the whole of step 0 — the programme starts empty, in draft, with sensible defaults you will adjust in Step 2.

If it fails, you get a message saying so and the empty state stays put. Nothing was created, so pressing the button again is safe.

⚠️ Watch out. This same "No hosted-buyer programme yet" screen also appears if the Command Centre temporarily cannot reach the service behind it — so on a bad connection it can appear for an event that does have a programme. Reload before pressing Create again.

Once the programme exists, all three steps unlock — still empty, but ready:

Its Step 2 and Step 3 look like this until you have done anything:

Step 1 — Participants

This step answers one question: who is in this programme? Two rosters — hosted buyers and exhibitors — and four numbers above them.

1.1 Read the four tiles

At their minimum and Below minimum both read 0 until you have run matching — there is nothing to measure yet. Afterwards they are your readiness gauge: the goal is Below minimum at 0.

1.2 Add hosted buyers

Press Add / edit on the Hosted buyers panel.

The black pills across the top are who is currently in the programme; the list below is everyone you could add. Tick to add, untick to remove, and the button at the bottom always states the outcome: Save list (8) means eight people will be in the list when you press it.

If somebody you expect is missing from the list: exhibitor admins and team members are hidden on purpose. They staff a stand, not a buying seat, and putting one inside a buyer programme puts a seller in the room. The note under the filters says so, and the button beside it lets you override it for the rare genuine case:

The override resets every time you reopen the dialog — it is an escape hatch for one decision, not a setting.

The filter chips narrow the list by what registration says about someone:

This chip is the fastest way to answer "is everyone registration calls a hosted buyer actually in my programme?" — because the two are deliberately separate things. The role is registration data. The programme is your list. Someone can be one without the other.

If your event has more than 200 attendees, the picker's list stops at 200 rows. Use the search box rather than scrolling — it searches name, company and email. (Verified: typing priya narrowed 23 rows to the matching ones.)

When you press Save:

• Adding people only → saves straight through.
• Taking anyone out → you get stopped first, because the button's count cannot express a removal:

That dialog is exact about the cost: how many people leave the programme, and how many draft meetings get deleted with them. Two things worth knowing:

• Draft meetings you locked are included. Removing someone from the programme overrides the lock.
• Published meetings are untouched, and everyone dropped keeps their hosted-buyer role — only the programme enrolment goes.

1.3 Add exhibitors

Same shape, on the second panel. One chip here — Opted into programme.

An exhibitor needs a booth/stand number for scheduling to work, because a hosted-buyer meeting always happens at the exhibitor's stand — you can move the time of a meeting but never its place.

1.4 Or import a CSV

Import CSV on either panel takes a file and matches its rows to people you already have:

• Hosted buyers are matched on the email column.
• Exhibitors are matched on the company (or name) column, falling back to external_id.

A minimal buyer file:

email,name,company
elena.kappas@example.com,Elena Kappas,Falcon Supply Co
skyler.reed@example.com,Skyler Reed,Freelance

Every import ends with a receipt:

The reasons you will see:

If there are more than 8 unmatched rows, the popup shows the first 8 and a count. Download CSV gives you the full list with your original columns intact, so you can fix it and re-import.

An import enrols people; it does not re-label them. Importing does not set anybody's hosted-buyer role — that is registration data, changed in Data Hub or by your registration feed. This matters: a CSV upload can never silently re-classify your attendees.

1.5 Configure one participant

Configure on any row opens the same dialog for buyers and exhibitors.

Three independently-saved fields — each has its own Save, so you can change one and leave the others alone.

Min / max meetings. Leave either blank to use the programme default; the placeholder tells you what that default currently is (Use global (2)). Type a number to override it for this one person.

If you set a minimum above the maximum, the participant's row grows an amber warning triangle — hover it and it says Min is above max. Nothing is blocked; it is a nudge.

On-site availability windows. By default a participant is treated as available for the whole programme. Add windows when they are not — a buyer flying in at noon, an exhibitor whose stand is unstaffed after 3pm.

Pick a day, a start and an end, then Save availability.

• If you have not set up event days yet, both buttons are disabled and the panel says Add event days in Setup & matching → Programme settings before setting windows. Do that first — a window with no day to attach to cannot be stored.
• If a row is missing its start or its end, that row is skipped and the confirmation says so: Saved, but 1 window was skipped — each needs both a start and an end time. A partial save is never reported as a clean one.
• Empty means available throughout. Removing every window is how you undo this.

Exhibitors get the same dialog, re-titled:

1.6 See someone's meetings without leaving the page

The chevron on any row expands it.

Each meeting shows the counterpart, their booth, the time (or Not yet scheduled), a match score and a confidence word. Before matching has run, this reads No meetings yet.

1.7 Remove a participant

The bin icon — deliberately set apart from the other two row buttons — asks a question rather than confirming one:

Two different outcomes, spelled out before you choose:

If they have scheduled meetings, the dialog says how many will go — and that anything already published stays. If they have none, that line simply is not there:

Either way you get about five seconds to Undo from the confirmation that follows, and the message names the cost again — "Removed "Skyler Reed" from the programme — also removes 3 scheduled meetings." (Verified: pressing Undo put the person and their meetings back exactly as they were; nothing had been written.)

1.8 The icons on a row

1.9 The status rail

Programme status, how many meetings are drafted versus published, the average match score, and when matching last ran. If anyone is below their minimum, a line appears at the top of the rail saying so — the programme's own "not ready yet" signal:

Step 2 — Setup & matching

This is where you set the rules, then run the matcher.

2.1 Programme settings

Duration and buffer together decide how many slots exist. A 20-minute meeting with a 30-minute buffer means one participant can hold a meeting every 50 minutes.

2.2 Schedule days and meeting locations

Add day for each day of the event, with the hours meetings may be booked in. Meeting locations are the tables or stands meetings can be placed at.

Both are required before anything can be scheduled. With no days, the availability builder in Step 1 is disabled too.

The bin on a day row and the ✕ on a location tag both remove immediately on screen — but nothing is written until you save, so reloading the page brings them back. (Verified.)

2.3 Saving

Changes are not live as you type. A bar appears at the bottom of the screen as soon as you touch anything, counting what is unsaved:

Press Save settings and it confirms:

If you leave a number field blank, the save is refused and the bar names the field:

Nothing is saved in that case — not the blank field, not the other five. Blanking a programme-wide minimum is not a meaningful instruction, so the honest answer is to refuse rather than invent a number. (If you want "no opinion" for one person, that is a per-participant override in Step 1, left blank.)

If your session has expired, you are taken to the sign-in page and nothing was saved.

2.4 Run the matcher

The lilac banner is the consequential action on this page, and it says what it is about to work with.

• First run — the button reads Run matching.
• Every run after that — it reads Re-run matching and asks first:

This keeps locked and scheduled meetings and re-matches the rest.

A run takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. When it finishes you get a result line that is about this run:

Matched 31 pair(s). 0 exhibitor(s) still below minimum. Auto-scheduled 29/768.

Matching schedules as it goes — you do not need a separate scheduling step after a run.

If the run takes longer than 60 seconds, you are told exactly that: Matching is still running after 60s — leave this page open or reload in a few minutes to see the result. It is still going; nothing was lost.

If the run could not be started, the reason is shown instead. You will not be handed the previous run's numbers dressed up as this one's.

Once there are matches, two coverage bars appear under the banner:

2.5 Re-run schedule only

This re-places existing meetings on the timetable without re-matching anybody. Use it after you change locations, add a day, or lock a meeting. It never publishes, and it is safe to run repeatedly.

Afterwards, four tiles report what actually happened:

If Unscheduled is not zero, the usual causes are: too few locations, too few hours, availability windows that do not overlap, or a walking buffer large enough to starve the grid. Widen one of those and run it again. Any warnings the scheduler produced are listed under the tiles.

If scheduling fails outright, an error line appears in this panel only — it will never show up under "Run matching" and read as a matching result.

Step 3 — Meetings

Everything the matcher produced, three ways to look at it, and the buttons that make it real.

3.1 Work remaining

One line, directly under the publish panel — the shortest honest summary of whether you are done:

3.2 Filters

If more than one day has meetings on it, a second row of chips appears to filter by day:

If a filter leaves nothing, you are told it was the filter — not that you have no meetings: No exhibitors match the current filters. Clear the search or filters above to see more rows.

3.3 The three views

By exhibitor — one row per exhibitor, with their count against their minimum and maximum. Rows short of their minimum sort to the top.

By hosted buyer — the same, from the buyer's side.

Each expanded meeting is one clickable row:

It carries both parties, the matcher's one-line reason, the time and place (or Not yet scheduled), a padlock if the meeting is locked, a published pill once it is, and a quality pill — the confidence word plus the score.

Schedule grid — the timetable itself, times down the side, locations across the top.

If there are clashes, a count sits above the grid, because a red cell twenty rows down is easy to scroll past:

Click a red cell to open one of the clashing meetings and move it. A clash can happen two ways: the scheduler placed a draft where a published meeting already sat, or somebody used Force anyway on a reschedule.

Wide events scroll sideways inside the grid. And if your filters exclude everything:

Editing a single meeting

Clicking any meeting — a row, or a grid cell — opens its detail dialog.

Top line: both parties. Then the status, the score, the confidence, and the time and place.

Why the matcher chose this

Match justification expands into the reasoning, both directions:

You get "why this exhibitor suits the buyer", "why this buyer suits the exhibitor", and a per-facet breakdown with the actual evidence taken from each side's profile — so you can tell a good match from a filler one at a glance.

Confidence is worth knowing:

Locking a meeting

Lock protects a meeting from the next matching or scheduling run. While locked, every edit in the dialog is disabled and the reason is stated on each disabled button ("Unlock match before rescheduling"). Unlock, edit, lock again.

The one thing a lock does not survive: removing either participant from the programme in Step 1. That is called out in the roster-save dialog.

Rescheduling a published meeting

Reschedule offers up to five suggested times, each already checked against both parties' other meetings, their availability windows and the walking buffer. Pick one of these.

The place is not offered, because it is not yours to change — a hosted-buyer meeting is always at the exhibitor's stand.

If the time you pick collides with another published meeting, you are shown the conflict and given a deliberate choice: Force anyway, or Cancel. Forcing creates a real double-booking, which is why the grid draws it in red afterwards.

If the suggestions cannot be loaded, you are told that — and specifically not told there are no free slots:

Couldn't check for free slots, so we can't say whether there are any.

That distinction runs through this whole dialog. "We looked and there are none" and "we could not look" are different sentences, and every list here gets the right one.

If the time you type clashes, you are told which rule it broke and given a deliberate choice. Nothing moves until you pick one:

There are three things it can tell you, and each has a different fix:

If a reschedule fails outright, the reason appears in the same place and the slot picker stays open, so a retry is one click.

Swapping either side

Swap exhibitor lists candidates ranked — score and confidence for each, so you can trade up:

Swap hosted buyer lists eligible buyers unranked (there is no "best buyer for an exhibitor" score):

A swap cancels the old meeting and creates a new one at the same time and place. The dialog closes when it succeeds — the meeting you were looking at genuinely no longer exists, and the new one is in the list behind you.

Either can come back with a Swap conflict — the new pairing would double-book somebody. Dismiss it and pick another candidate. You will also be stopped if the buyer you are swapping in is the confirmed rep for that same exhibitor: nobody can hold a meeting with their own stand.

Removing a meeting

The ✕ asks once. A removed meeting drops out of every count and view. Unlock first if it is locked. (Verified: removing one took the draft count from 23 to 22.)

An unscheduled meeting

A meeting with no time yet shows a Schedule panel instead of Reschedule. Until the programme is published that panel has no button — it states that the meeting has no time and names the route that places it, because placing meetings one at a time is a published-programme operation. Use Step 2 → Re-run schedule only, which places every unscheduled meeting against both parties' availability in one pass.

Re-captured on 25 August 2026. Earlier versions of this guide showed a Schedule button here that always failed; it has been withdrawn, and the panel now carries the sentence above.

Publishing, re-publishing, un-publishing and scheduling a publish

Publishing is the moment the schedule becomes real:

Confirms every scheduled meeting and sends it to hosted buyers and exhibitors. They cannot cancel or move a meeting, only you can. Change anything and press Publish again to update them.

1. Publishing the first time

If anyone is below their meeting minimum, you are stopped once and told who:

1 hosted buyer(s) below minimum. Publish anyway?

This is a warning, not a block — a programme where one buyer is one meeting short is often worth publishing anyway. Cancel goes back so you can run matching again first.

Every publish reports these numbers:

Skipped no rep is the one that catches people out. A meeting needs a real person on the exhibitor's side to send it to. If the exhibitor has no confirmed rep, the meeting cannot be created — and the warnings list names every affected meeting:

That tile now counts only missing reps. It used to absorb unrelated failures as well, which sent people to fix exhibitor reps that were never the problem; those now land in Failed.

The fix is upstream: link a rep to each exhibitor (Exhibitor Leads / Data Hub), then publish again.

If publishing fails, you get the reason and no result grid. A failed publish will never render as four zeroes that look like a programme with nothing in it.

2. Re-publishing after a change

Publishing is repeatable and additive. Once the programme is published, the button reads Publish updates:

This confirms every scheduled meeting that is not live yet and updates everyone whose meeting changed. Already-published meetings that have not changed are left alone.

This is how you get a new meeting out to people after the first publish — you add a participant, run matching again, and press Publish updates. Meetings already live are counted, not duplicated:

0 Published · 8 Already published · 1 Skipped unscheduled · 22 Skipped no rep

Nothing new to publish in that example — which is exactly what it should say. Publishing twice by accident cannot double-book anybody.

3. Un-publishing — the way back

Pressed Publish too early? Unpublish withdraws the whole schedule.

Every published meeting is cancelled and both sides are told it changed. The pairings, times and locations are kept, so you can fix things and publish again — but the people who already have an itinerary will see their meetings disappear until you do.

It reports what it did:

The programme goes back to review, and the publish button reverts to Publish schedule. Because nothing was destroyed, the recovery is simply: unpublish → fix → publish again, and the same meetings come back at the same times. (Verified end to end: 8 back to draft, 8 cancelled, 0 failures — then a later publish re-created all 8.)

⚠️ Un-publishing is visible to participants. It is not an "undo" in the private sense — everyone holding an itinerary is told their meeting changed, and their meeting disappears until you publish again. Use it when the schedule is genuinely wrong, not to tidy up.

4. Publishing automatically at a chosen time

You do not have to be at your desk for the moment the schedule should go live.

Pick a date and time, optionally tick Send itinerary emails too, and press Schedule publish. The panel then states the commitment in your own words and your own timezone:

Publishes automatically on Monday, 24 August 2026 at 12:52 pm · and sends itinerary emails

Things worth knowing:

• It runs on the server. You can close the page, sign out, go to bed. (Verified: a publish scheduled for 12:54 fired at 12:54 with the browser idle, published 8 meetings and recorded the full result.)

• Anything you change before then is included — it publishes the schedule as it stands at that moment, not as it stood when you set the timer.

• One schedule per programme. Setting a new time replaces the old one rather than stacking a second publish.

• A time in the past is refused, with the reason:

  

• It does not ask about the below-minimum warning. You accepted that when you scheduled it. If some participants are short of their minimum, it will publish anyway.

• Cancel scheduled publish drops it. And un-publishing also cancels any pending scheduled publish — otherwise an unpublish could be silently undone an hour later.

• Once it has fired, the panel goes back to offering a fresh schedule rather than advertising a publish that has already happened:

  

You can also schedule from review, before you have ever published:

If the panel cannot check whether something is scheduled, it says so rather than showing you an empty form — "Couldn't check whether a publish is scheduled — reload to try again. If one was set, it will still run."

5. Sending itineraries

Send itinerary emails is disabled until the programme is published. It sends each participant their own schedule, and reports:

If the send fails entirely, you are told so. A failure never shows up as "0 recipients · 0 sent", which would be indistinguishable from a programme with nobody to email.

If Failed is not zero, check those participants' email addresses in Step 1 — a missing email also raises the amber triangle on their row.

Gotchas — and what not to do

The things that actually go wrong, in the order you are likely to hit them.

Before you match

While matching and scheduling

Around publishing

Roles, removals and locks

Every "if" in one table

What the colours and words mean

Every status colour on this screen is paired with a word — you never have to read colour alone.