"Ticket Already Recorded" error

We have run into things like this in the past. When you scanned the ticket did you happen to check the ticket number on the scanners screen. Did it match the ticket number printed on the ticket. My guess is that you did not look that carefully. We did not for a long time.

After a bunch of back and frothing, What we have discovered is that sometimes (very infrequently) the scanners do not get the correct number out of the barcode. Typically dropping a digit. If that occurs it is likely that the number on the screen of the scanner screen does not match the number in the barcode on the ticket. By dropping a digit the number on the scanner will reference some ticket in a show in our case many years ago. That has already been attended by some one else. When you rescanned you got the correct ticket number and all seemed to be well.

In chasing down similar situation I was able to cause this situation by partially obscuring the barcode while scanning.

If this dropping of a digit was happening to you. You may find signs of this in the Nscan tables.

In an attempt to reduce the number of time this happens to us. I'm wondering what type of barcode you are using. We are using the old code 39 style bar code. This barcode has no checksum digit imbedded in the barcode. We were very early with Nscan at that time this was the recommended style bar code. I'm wondering if the type of barcode in use makes this more likely a problem.

Any insights you can share with me or the community would be greatly appreciated.

--Tom Brown
Business Analytics mgr

Brooklyn Academy of Music BAM
Peter J. Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217

www.BAM.org

Tbrown@bam.org
718-724-8135



On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 4:59 AM, Philip Cartwright wrote:

Hi Jennifer,

Do you have access to the database tables? All scans are logged in the table [T_NSCAN_EVENT_CONTROL]. It would be interesting to see if the "ticket already recorded" was logged in there. Might also be worth seeing if any of the other tickets in that order had been recorded as being scanned twice.

We had an issue of ushers accidentally double scanning a ticket, if the scan button is pressed twice in quick succession, the request gets sent twice. The "ticket already recorded" message would follow so quickly after the OK one, that on the device it just looked the ticket had already been scanned. Not quite the same issue as yours, as ticket would show up as attended, but perhaps it's a delayed response from a previous double scan?

Phil
From: Jennifer K. Miller
Sent: 6/9/2016 11:52:44 AM

We are experiencing an interesting error on our scanners and wanted to see if anyone else had observed the same issue.

Our ticket takers report that intermittently, a ticket will show up as "Ticket Already Recorded" even though the guest is entering for the first time. It will happen to one ticket out of an order, while all the other tickets scan just fine.

I had a chance to see this myself today. I was scanning tickets for a family of four. One ticket out of the bunch showed "Ticket Already Recorded" while the other three scanned successfully. I kept the stubs and looked at the order in the client. In Order History, the three tickets showed as attended, while the one that threw the error did not.

After looking in Tessitura, I tried again to scan the ticket, and it scanned just fine. That was about 10-15 minutes after the first scan attempt.

This has happened with multiple scanners. We are using Motorola MC40.

Anyone else run into this?

Thanks!
Jennifer


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View this message online at http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/groups/n-scan/forum/p/16161/48908.aspx#48908

Thank you for the suggestions!

We did some more digging in our N-Scan exception report and realized that the "Already Recorded" error was actually occurring on the ticket number just prior to the one I had been trying to scan. So apparently, one ticket scan was being double-submitted, but the timing of the error made it look like it was occurring on the following, fresh ticket.

We are not sure exactly what's causing the double-submission of that number, but we've instructed staff to just wait a second and try the scan again. I haven't been receiving staff feedback about the error since then.

Possibly related -- three of our scanners are currently in for repairs because of problems with the triggers. We're continuing to monitor, and I'll post an update if we learn anything new.

Thank you!

Thank you for the suggestions!

We did some more digging in our N-Scan exception report and realized that the "Already Recorded" error was actually occurring on the ticket number just prior to the one I had been trying to scan. So apparently, one ticket scan was being double-submitted, but the timing of the error made it look like it was occurring on the following, fresh ticket.

We are not sure exactly what's causing the double-submission of that number, but we've instructed staff to just wait a second and try the scan again. I haven't been receiving staff feedback about the error since then.

Possibly related -- three of our scanners are currently in for repairs because of problems with the triggers. We're continuing to monitor, and I'll post an update if we learn anything new.

Thank you!