We are wanting to allow customers to "split" a payment into two parts; half now, half at a future date. For a package of $2000, we want to take a credit card and charge $1000 now, and have the card charged again at the date in the future, (30 days or whenever), for the balance. We need to show the full $2000 as deferred revenue on sale. I understand that Tessitura can handle this through using the Invoice Billing utility or the Ticket Order Billing utility. I'd like to hear what others have done and are doing, what concerns the Finance Dept has, and any other thoughts. thank you!
I pushed to use the Ticket Order Billing Utility when offering partial/multi-pay subscriptions but this wasn't possible due to how some of our telemarketing commission reports work. We use an "other" payment method called "Sub Multi-Pay Pending" to pay off half of the order and the orders were processed in a special channel so they could be easily identified. The second charge is processed manually on a predetermined date. So this payment option is offered for a select period of time and all second payments are processed on the same future date. Luckily there are not that many of these orders for Ticket Services to process. I also created a script to verify that all patrons had a zero balance for that "Sub Multi-Pay Pending" payment method which helped ease our finance dept.
Can you print tickets when using the Ticket Order Billing Utility and an order is not fully paid? If not then that was an issue as well. We needed to print tickets before the second payment was conducted. Obviously we wouldn't send tickets out until the second payment was confirmed.