We are looking to refine how we track tickets that are underwritten by foundations, corporations, etc for students to attend public performances (non-student matinees) and I wondered how others are handling this situation.
We are currently using a generic comp code. Since we are unable to distinguish staff comps from these underwritten comps, we are considering creating a new Education comp code that will have a $0 value. I think that fixes the tracking issue, but we are left with the concern that these "comp" tickets will affect the overall average ticket price for productions which affects what we pay in royalties, report in sales, etc.
What are you guys doing? Is anyone doing any kind of transfer from contributed to ticketed income?
Thanks,
Keri
Thanks, Lucie.
When you say you tracked them as a cost, can you tell me if this was something you did in Tess, or just on the Finance end of reporting?
Thanks again!
-Keri
Lucie,
Thanks so much for your thoughts on this subject. The gift certificate idea is intriguing. I'll bring some of these ideas to the table and try to remember to post what we end up doing and whether or not it works!
We used to track these expenses as a cost. We did not want to pay for the tickets directly using the contribution, because we wanted the contribution to show in the Contributions module.
I believe the Metropolitan Opera worked out something in this area when Agnes Varis sponsored a rush ticket program.
Met, any comment?
Lucie
__________________________________________
Lucie Spieler
IT Development and Training Manager FLORIDA GRAND opera
We used to pay for all comp tickets (except papering the house) with a “priced comp” price type using a payment method that tied to department (we used Administration, Development, Marketing, Music/Production). We had one comp for subscriptions, another for single tickets.
For budget purposes, departments would be “charged” for the tickets they used.
We no longer do this: All our comps are $0.
We had a program a couple of years ago where tickets for certain patrons (based on a raffle they had entered) were paid for through a grant. We paid for those using a payment method tied via GL to the grant. I don’t know how our accounting department tracked this, and in theory on the ticketing side we had no limit to how much we could pay for with this payment method. I’m wondering if a better method wouldn’t have been to set up a gift certificate with a set limit, and pay for that with the ticket subsidy payment method, and use it to pay for the affected tickets. Haven’t tested this, though…
We are starting to do this at the AKM using pricing rules.
We're approaching it this way; say we receive $5000 for student admissions in the form of a grant. We'll process that as a contribution the normal way. We then calculate how many student admissions $5000 is worth at the student price type and calculate that as the cap on a pricing rule. We set the pricing rule to make the price zero and we issue a student ticket with a zero value. We name the source code and pricing rule so it's clearly identified that tickets issued using this pricing rule are associated with the organization that issued the grant. This ensures that the $5000 is only used at a specified price type and only on admission to the museum on behalf of the funding organization.
We've used this to track similar initiatives as we've had a lot of people step up and subsidize admission for Syrian refugees, subsidize our summer camps for under-priveledged kids, etc. It's been working well and with the pricing rules reporting it makes it pretty easy to see how each initiative is doing.
Hope that helps.
-Brian