GUIDE · THE MATRIX
Zones are places. Pass types are people. The matrix is the policy.
Most accreditation confusion is one confusion: mixing up the place and the person. Separate them and the access matrix designs itself, the gate sheet becomes readable, and the arguments end early.
THE SHORT ANSWER
A zone is a physical area access is controlled into. A pass type is a named category of person, such as crew, artist or contractor. The access matrix is the grid that says which pass types may enter which zones. Together they are your entire access policy, and every gate sheet, laminate and scanner rule derives from that one grid.
Naming zones
A zone is somewhere you could stand. If you cannot point at it on the site plan and describe where it stops, it is not a zone. Perimeter, arena, backstage, production compound, artist area, catering, campsite, pit, roof, plant room, box office, loading dock. Name them the way the site already names them on radio, because a zone whose name only exists in the accreditation system will be called something else by everyone actually working there.
Zones nest. Backstage may contain the artist area, which may contain dressing rooms. Nesting is worth modelling explicitly, because otherwise every dressing-room permission has to be restated on every pass type that already has backstage, and the restating is where the mistakes live.
Naming pass types
A pass type is a category of person with a shared set of rights. Ten to twenty covers nearly every event. If you are over forty, two of them are the same thing under different names, and the duplicate will diverge by show day.
- CREW: your own working staff, usually the widest access.
- CONTRACTOR: third-party working staff, often document-gated and staged by build phase.
- ARTIST: performing party, with a separate guest category so the two allocations do not blur.
- MEDIA or PRESS: time-limited and usually escorted into performance areas.
- SUPPLIER or VENDOR: traders and service providers, tied to a pitch or a delivery window.
- VIP or GUEST: hospitality access, front of house, rarely working areas.
- VEHICLE: not a person at all, and worth its own pass type because a vehicle pass controls a different question, which is what may be driven where and when.
Access all areas, and why it is usually a lie
Nearly every event prints something called AAA, and on nearly every event it does not mean all areas. It does not open the roof, the plant room, the cash office or the pyro store. That is fine, as long as the matrix says so and the gate sheet agrees. It stops being fine when the laminate says ALL AREAS in large letters and a steward has to decide, at two in the morning, whether that includes the tower they are standing at the bottom of.
The practical fix is boring and works: make the pass say what it opens, keep genuinely unrestricted access to a very small number of named people, and never let a printed word outrank the matrix.
Colour coding, and its one rule
Colour is the fastest access check there is. A steward reads a colour across a field faster than they read text at arm's length, which is why colour coding is near universal at large events.
The rule is that colours must be distinguishable in the conditions they are actually read in: at night, under coloured stage lighting, at three metres, on a wet laminate, by someone with colour vision deficiency. Around one in twelve men has some form of it. If two of your zone colours are red and green, some proportion of your security team is reading the text instead, which is slower than you planned for.
Day and time validity
Access changes as a site builds. A rigger who needs the arena on Tuesday does not need the campsite on Friday, and a contractor whose work finished in build week should not still be scanning in on show day. Staged access, by day or by phase, is one of the highest-value things in accreditation and one of the least used, because on a spreadsheet it is unmanageable.
If you do stage access, decide early whether the staging lives on the pass type, on the individual, or on the physical credential, and be consistent. Three different answers on one event is how a gate ends up with two versions of the truth.
Keeping the matrix honest
A matrix is only worth having if it is the single source. The failure mode is familiar: the grid is signed off, then three changes are agreed by radio and email in the last week, and the gate sheets in the folder are from the version before those changes.
So version it, date it, name who signed it, and make it obvious which printed artefacts are now stale. Any process that does that reliably is a good process, whatever it runs on.
Written from running accreditation on live events, and generalised so it is useful whatever you run it on. Last reviewed: 19 August 2026.
QUESTIONS THIS PAGE GETS ASKED
What is an access matrix?
The grid mapping pass types to zones: pass types down the side, zones across the top, a tick where that category of person may enter that area. It is the complete access policy for the event in one artefact, and every gate sheet, scanner rule and laminate design derives from it.
What does AAA mean at an event?
Access All Areas, the highest general pass type. In practice it rarely means all areas: roofs, plant rooms, cash offices and pyrotechnic stores are normally excluded and controlled separately. What AAA opens should be defined in the matrix, not inferred from the words printed on the laminate.
How many pass types should an event have?
Ten to twenty for most events. Fewer than eight usually means access is broader than intended; more than forty usually means duplicates exist under different names, which diverge as the event approaches.
Should vehicles have their own pass type?
Yes. A vehicle pass answers a different question from a person pass: what may be driven where, when, and for how long. Tying vehicle access to a driver's pass breaks the moment somebody else moves the van.