Ticket Recon - Transition from Weekly to Daily

Former Member
Former Member $organization

Hello everyone! 

We are starting the transition from doing ticket reconciliation weekly to daily. For years we have we run a series of standard reports in conjunction with a very convoluted, complex spreadsheet. It doesn't work very well, and it can take a lot of time to find the issue if something doesn't match since we're going through so many orders. 

Would anyone be willing to share their process: what reports you pull, your strategy, perhaps an Analytics dashboard? 

We have a unique situation when it comes to ticketing. We do ticketing for an orchestra, but we also provide ticketing services (on contract) for a theatre that brings in presented shows from promoters. The revenue and fees from these two different entities must be separate. In addition, the fees for both kinds are slightly different. We have order based fees, percentage seat level fees, and flat seat level fees, but some of them differ based on MOS. Our challenge with Analytics is that fees are not directly tied back to a performance, so we can't report on them to reconcile in the Finance cube. And no, we can't put these fees into layers. 

We have never reconciled daily, so any advice, strategies, widgets, reports, etc are appreciated! Thank you in advance!

Erin

Ticketing and Data Services Manager

  • Without getting into the details, but since the reporting is the bottleneck, could you just have separately named fees for each situation? Since they are separate fees, you could then report on them in reports or Analytics. I'm guessing that this idea is the lowest hanging fruit.

    For example: Orchestra_Order_Fee, Orchestra_SeatLvl_Fee, Orchestra_Flat_Fee, Theater_Order_Fee, Theater_SeatLvl_Fee, and Theater_Flat_Fee.

  • Hi Erin,

    I have been doing daily reconciliations from the beginning of our relationship with Tessitura. And we are both a presenter of Tours at the city theater and produce our own shows in our own space that has a loan on it that means I need to keep that money separate. And then the final snafu in this whole setup is that the city theater uses TicketMaster.

    I have not transitioned to Tessitura Analytics yet. It is my goal to work on Analytics once things settle down a bit more from the chaos that has been the past two years.

    I do it all with about 25 reports that get emailed to me (csv) in the middle of the night from the system. I then put them in a large spreadsheet on different tabs and use pivot tables to breakdown the reports the way I need to see the data. Which in turn gets linked to a single sheet, 2-sided report that tracks day sales, cumulative sales, potential gross, and subscription seats for the two different venues/subscriptions.

    And Neil is correct in that the fees have to be separate names (we have BOT - tours and BMC - our venue) in order for it to work. We also separate them out by web vs. inhouse.

    If you are interested in which reports and how I do it (it now takes me about 20 minutes to get the report done each morning), please contact me at sslocum@broadwaysacramento.com.

    Sally Slocum (She/Her) | Director of Ticketing & Analytics
    Broadway Sacramento | Broadway At Music Circus & Broadway On Tour
    1419 H Street, Sacramento, CA 95814 | P: 916-557-1999 | broadwaysacramento.com