We are getting ready to upgrade from Version 11 to Version 12 in the next month or so. The changes from the old system of pricing to the price templates in particular seem to be a thing for a lot of organizations. Since we will be building and going on sale with our new season relatively soon after the upgrade, we were wondering if anyone had any particular tips for success and/or definite things to avoid doing in 12. Our thoughts are mostly on price templates, but any advice would be appreciated.
FYI, we are a consortium environment with three venues, and our own season packages and performances have prices that have always varied greatly between each performance and package both. In addition, we also have 6 resident companies, most of whom also have their own season packages and performances, though their prices tend to be more regular.
Thanks!
John A. Moskal II
Hi John,
We went to v12 this past June. Since then I've met monthly with the ticketing managers in our consortium as a "check in" on v12 functionality so that they can share tips, questions, etc. A couple of things that stand out to me from our experience:
We didn't really focus training around templates as much as I thought we would. It seemed to make sense to look at how existing pricing came over into v12 and build from there using season manager or in ticketing setup. Once that was in place, showing them the "save as template" feature within an existing show was the entry point to templates, rather than vice-versa.
The Price Layer descriptions for the existing pricing when you upgrade are old price map names, which, depending on which map is chosen to be the layer name, may be confusing to users, but they can easily rename it. For example, we had pricemaps named "06 tCOMP" that were chosen as the layer name even though the layer is obviously made up of more than the comp price. A right click and rename was an easy solution to cut down on this kind of confusion.
The price types having a default Ticket Design was a little gotcha for a few when starting out; just something to double check. And of course, GLs! Since each layer has a default GL, any time pricing is added it's time to double check that. Our flow is typically to add pricing in different segments (i.e. sub pricing happens, then a few months later group pricing, then singles), so remembering to flip the GL when adding pricing is something we've tried to emphasize to the folks doing setups.
We had some crashing when users tried to copy a row and then paste it multiple times. Pasting twice seems like a bad scene. And it never hurts to review the Known Defects list in the Support Section of this site. Number 3812 is one that has caught our Ticketing Managers when building prod seasons on many occasions.
Overall, I think you'll find that pricing setup changes in v12 are awesome! Hope everyone there who has their fingers in setup really enjoys the switch.
Thank you very much, Nick and Kelly!! Your insight will definitely assist as we make this transition. It's always good to hear the advice of someone who has been through it before you go through it yourself.