Your first event

Spring Vendor Showcase 2026 runs March 12-14 at the Riverbend Convention Center. Time to put that in DisplaySync so Lakeshore AV can start claiming signs against it.

Events are the unit of work in DisplaySync — every sign belongs to one event, and most of what you do (claiming, monitoring, sending commands) happens inside an event's context.

Where to start

From the dashboard, go to Events in the left sidebar, then click the New Event button (top-right of the events list).

If you don't see Events at all, you're not in any organization — go back and finish Account setup first.

Required fields

The new-event form has four required fields, marked with an asterisk:

Event Name — what you'll see it called everywhere. For Lakeshore: "Spring Vendor Showcase 2026".
Timezone — the venue's timezone. Pre-filled from the device you're creating the event on, since events are usually created on site. For Lakeshore: America/Vancouver.
Start Date — the first day of the event.
End Date — the last day of the event (same as start date for one-day events).

Venue is optional but worth filling in — free-form text, useful when you're managing multiple concurrent events at different locations. For Lakeshore: "Riverbend Convention Center".

There's no "save draft" — once you submit the form, the event exists in upcoming state.

About the timezone

The timezone is the one field that isn't just record-keeping. It's the authority two other things run on:

Signs show times in this zone. Kiosk hardware loses time — a dead clock battery or a venue with no time server leaves a sign hours out. A sign at this event renders content in the event's timezone regardless of what its own operating system believes. If your content shows a session schedule or a countdown, this is what keeps it right. See Clock and displayed time.
Scheduled refreshes fire in this zone. A standing "refresh every wall at 07:00" runs at 07:00 at the venue, not wherever the person who set it up happens to be. See Bulk actions → Scheduled.

The default is the timezone of whatever device you're on. If you're creating the event from head office for a venue three zones away, change it — that's the one case where the default is wrong.

Editing an event requires the timezone too. If you're opening an older event that predates the field, the form asks you to pick one explicitly rather than guessing from your device.

Event start and end dates are calendar dates. When you set the start date to "March 12, 2026", you'll see "March 12, 2026" displayed everywhere — the dashboard, the mobile app, and your team members in any time zone — without any timezone shift. The date you typed is the date everyone sees.

Other timestamps in DisplaySync — heartbeat times, audit-log entries, "X seconds ago" relative times — are moments in time, so those do render in your local time zone. Only event start and end dates use the calendar-date treatment.

This matters because event teams often span time zones. The Lakeshore AV founder might enter the dates from Vancouver while a tech in Toronto reads them — both see "March 12" without arithmetic.

The event's Timezone field doesn't change any of this. Start and end dates stay calendar dates in every zone; the timezone governs times-of-day — what the signs display and when scheduled refreshes fire.

Event status lifecycle

An event moves through four states automatically:

upcoming — created, but the start date hasn't arrived yet
active — current date is between start and end (inclusive)
completed — current date is past the end date
archived — operator-set; available from any state

The first three transitions happen on their own based on dates. Archive is the only one you set manually — typically after the event ends and you want to clear it out of the active-events view. Archived events keep all their data; you can unarchive at any time.

One billing consequence to know: sign-day metering starts when an event becomes active. A sign linked to an upcoming event isn't counted toward your tier limits or your monthly bill until the event's start date arrives. Lakeshore can pre-link all 40 signs to Spring Vendor Showcase in February without burning sign-days — the meter starts March 12. See Pricing tiers for the full sign-day model.

Pre-event vs. during-event at a glance

The work you do in an event splits cleanly along the upcoming-vs-active boundary.

Pre-event (event in upcoming):

Pre-create Sign records for known booth positions
Set assigned URLs for each sign so they display content the moment they come online
Invite the team and assign per-event roles
Test the venue network from a single test sign

During-event (event in active):

Claim or link the remaining signs as kiosks come up at the venue
Monitor sign health from the dashboard or mobile app
Send remote commands (refresh, reboot) when a sign misbehaves
Watch the notification feed for offline alerts (Notifications)

The dashboard's event detail page is where you'll spend most of an active event. See Dashboard tour for the layout.

What's next

Event created — time to put a kiosk on the wall: Claim your first sign.