Auction IT Wizard

The philosophy of Auction IT Wizard is to provide efficient and accurate, real-time event management tracking, using modern technology combined with personalized customer service at your event.  With our experienced and expert staff along with a few of your volunteers, we can help your event be successful. We provide all of the technology needed to efficiently capture ALL of the financial transactions at your event. Your guests will rave about the service and how fast and easy it was to check in and checkout and pay for their items. The organization will benefit by accuracy of sales, detailed reporting, an image of professionalism, and in many cases, increased sales since it is easy for the guest to make purchases.

When the guest arrives at the event, we give them a unique numbered wristband. Using touch-screen tablets, the staff will check in the participant capturing their credit card and any other necessary personal information. We can sell them entrance tickets, raffle tickets, or any other optional items during this check-in process. We can also tell them their table assignment. The guests will then use their wristband throughout the evening to make donations, bid on auction items, buy drinks, pay for swag or anything else that is sold at the event. This eliminates the guest from having to pull money from their pocket or purse for every transaction. The wristband becomes their private charge account for the night. 

For larger groups of guests, we can have the guests “self-check-in” using their cell phone via texting. The process verifies the guest, can provide them their table number, and the guest can even enter

their credit card via text if they want. All the staff have to do is issue them their numbered wristband, and swipe their credit card if they did not enter it via texting. This self-check-in texting process significantly reduces waiting times for the guests. Of course any guest can still check-in the normal way.

Whereas traditional silent auctions require collecting a duplicate copy of the bid sheet when the auction closes and giving these sheets to a plethora of staff to collate and enter into a computer (or not), we instead take the computer to the bid sheet –in the form of a tablet.  With this technology, each of our staff can close about 3 items per minute. The data is immediately transmitted to the database and saved. For live auctions, we use tablets to record the guest’s wristband and award that live auction item to the guest - all in real-time. This system completely eliminates the auction paper scramble, and the “after event” accounting nightmare.

For more progressive events, we can do an electronic auction. The guests can use their cell phone to place bids or find a volunteer that has a tablet to enter their bid. If they are using their cell phone they will receive texts alerts on their bidding progress. We also will display the bidding status on an overhead projector that guests can view. The organization will need to provide marketing material for the auction items that has the auction item number on it, but there won’t be any bid sheets.

Paddle raises are without a doubt, a very fast way to raise a lot of  money. They are a fundamental necessity for most of the organizations we work with. There are a few proven methods of accurately recording paddle raises depending upon how you run your paddle raise. We have developed a specific application for FANs that allow us to capture the data in real time and provide instantaneous feed back to the auctioneer. We know that this is one of the most important aspects of your event and we will work with you to understand your process and provide the most efficient method of recordingthe data.

Using tablets, your staff/volunteers can sell raffle tickets, swag, poker chips, or just about anything you are selling at the event. The guest can use their wristband to charge their account or if they wish, they can pay cash at the point of sale. This makes purchases by the guest as easy as possible. All transactions are electronically recorded and automatically updated on the guest’s account. If your event is providing no-host bar service, we can provide POS bar terminals. The guests can use their wristband to purchase drinks or pay with cash if they wish. Note, allowing the guests to easily buy drinks seems to have a side effect of promoting increased sales of other items at the event. We canprovide detailed bar reports for the bar vendor.

For certain events, an electronic raffle is much simpler than a traditional paper ticket raffle. When a guest buys an e-raffle, the system automatically tracks how many tickets they purchased. There is no need for the guest to fill out their name and number on a ticket. The e-raffle is associated to their wristband and account. The system can do multiple raffle categories with unlimited items in each category. When it comes time to pick the winners, the system will automatically and randomly choose the winners. We also have the ability to select the winners using “slot machine” style program while projected on a big screen.

Because all purchases and auction winnings have been automatically entered into the system throughout the event, long checkout lines to pay are virtually eliminated. Using the tablets, our staff will review the purchases with the guests, and provide an accurate invoice of their purchases if they wish. The guest has the option to pay with the credit card on file, a new credit card, cash, check, or be invoiced (requires manager approval). 

For those guests who have won auction or raffle items, when they complete the checkout process, a pick list, which shows what items they won, will print out for the auction staff to use to collect the

items for the guest. The volunteers or staff will then have the guest sign the pick list as a record that the guest received their goods. The auction pick up is by far the most time consuming process and we have developed a method to make this process as efficient and quick as possible.