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How to avoid refunds adjusting prior dates's data

Nathanael Pearson
$organization

We are looking into ways to avoid having refunds alter the attendance/revenue from past performances. We use an Analytics dashboard to report on attendance/sales/revenue for each performance day in the past(we're General Admission, so each day of the year has one). Refunds pulling tickets and revenue from performances is how Tessitura operates, so we're trying to figure out the best way to report accurately on attendance and revenue. The options seem to be:

  1. Don't allow refunds past the performance date. 
    1. Our dashboard looks at past perf dates, so refunds before attendance (or even day of) is no problem.
  2. Use a payment method to return funds from a specific GL.
    1. this must be tightly controlled and reported on, to reduce errors or possibility of fraud.
  3. Some sort of custom reporting
    1. this could be manual (performance/revenue numbers are transcribed once the date is past, and not adjusted further)
    2. this could be customized within Tessitura (this seems rather complex)

How have other organizations solved this issue?

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  • $organization

    Hi Nathaneal, 

    We're doing a combination of the first two. 

    Once a performance has played, the box office locks it (Locked status, On Sale un-checked), so that no one pulls any tickets out of it from that time. We have a lot of performance-based reporting (royalties, commissions, etc.) that cannot be altered later, so we do not go back into the performances for any reason.

    If a refund is necessary for customer service purposes after a performance has played (not canceled performances, obviously), then a manager can, in the original order, withdraw funds from a production-specific payment method and apply them to the customer's credit card. Each of our productions is set up as a season slot (A1, A2, S1, S2, etc.) so if it's a ticket for the A2 slot, the funds would come from Past Date Refund A2 which pulls from a designated matching GL that the finance team reconciles on the back end. 

  • $organization in reply to Lauren Cartelli (Past Member)

    Thanks! That's good information to have.

    How well do you feel that's working? What stress points do you find occur? If you could change things to make things better/easier, how would you change them?

  • $organization in reply to Nathanael Pearson

    It's working very well. Having the performances locked has saved us a lot of trouble. We, as a rule, do not use UNP line items but occasionally they show up because reps forget to avoid them when processing an exchange. If/when that happens, we'll go in and unlock the performance so that we can delete those line items, but that doesn't affect the seat count or revenue numbers. Use of the payment methods is very trackable in Analytics, so it's been very successful. The only thing I'm not sure of is how precisely our finance team is reconciling those transactions, but it's being used infrequently enough that it's probably pretty simple. 

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  • $organization in reply to Nathanael Pearson

    It's working very well. Having the performances locked has saved us a lot of trouble. We, as a rule, do not use UNP line items but occasionally they show up because reps forget to avoid them when processing an exchange. If/when that happens, we'll go in and unlock the performance so that we can delete those line items, but that doesn't affect the seat count or revenue numbers. Use of the payment methods is very trackable in Analytics, so it's been very successful. The only thing I'm not sure of is how precisely our finance team is reconciling those transactions, but it's being used infrequently enough that it's probably pretty simple. 

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