Cross-posted in Ticketing & Customer Service
My museum participates in the CT Art Trail Passport program. This gist is you pay $35, we give you a physical passport which is good for over 25 museums in the state.
The problem is patrons can also buy them online or buy them from other museums. Online orders do not get given the physical passport, and if other museums don't have them (the physical passports) the other museums will send patrons to us with a receipt telling us to give them the hard copies.
The ones we sell ourselves in Tessitura I know how to track. We sell them as a Fee, so I run a "Ticketing Fee Revenue" report (a little wonky but it works for us). The issue we have is tracking the ones we don't sell ourselves but have to give out.
Our thought is to discount the Fee down to $0, so that we have a record of them in Tessitura as being given out, even if we did not take in the dollar amount for them. Is that possible?
If it is, I'm realizing that will screw up the "Ticketing Fee Revenue" report (because there will be no revenue), so does anyone have a workaround for that?
If I can't discount Fees...does anyone know of a trick that could work to keep track of how many physical passports we are giving out?
If it is a $0 item, can you set it up as a performance? You'd just sell it as a $0 ticket. Then you could use ticketing reports to keep track of how many are sold.
I would, but the original items are not $0 dollars. We sell some in house for $35, and others we hand out if they were purchased other places (so $0 for these). We would like to keep both sets all in the same place for easier and cleaner reporting. So on a monthly basis, I would need to know how many $35 dollar passports and $0 passports were given to patrons.
Can you set them all up as a performance? You would have two price types -- $35 for the ones you sell and a comp/$0 price type for the ones you distribute but don't collect for.
I could I guess. We've never done it that way. And we sell them 365 days a year (or pretty close based on our operating days), so it would be 300+ performances that would have to get built every year. Not impossible, but we're looking for easy. lol
You can build all those performances in one fell swoop using the product creation tool in season manager. We don't use fees for anything here, so I can't speak to that setup, but I do set up performances in bulk all the time.
One performance with perf_date about the end of your FY that sells all year for all the passports or just the comps? We do something like this for some of our always-on streaming performances; e.g. they get three days access from purchase, but they can purchase any time between now and the perf_date. Works so far so long as we create a fresh copy every season.
Interesting. Good to know.
My only concern is that we've been selling the $35 as a fee for a whole year (and even in our old system had it set up as merchandise). We've never sold these as tickets or programs/performances. So I guess I want to know if it will screw up any of the historical data to switch?
Changing how you do this wouldn't mess up history, so long as you know you changed methods. You have to take into account if you're doing TY LY comparisons. One thing to know about having a single end of FY perf is that perf reporting has to include that distant date. Daily order reporting would most likely capture the orders, but if you're looking at perfs in a date range, you have to include. This could be good or bad depending if you want the sales included in your standard daily or weekly perf reporting or not. If you do, then daily or weekly perfs might be in order.