We have a customer interested in subsidizing part of the ticket cost for their group. They want their members to be able to purchase tickets individually at $x and once we have a final tally, we'd bill the organization for the remaining ticket cost. Ideally they'd like their members to be able to purchase online. We’ve had a few ideas but are looking for the most seamless procedure - has anyone has done something like this?
Judy,
The big thing that comes to mind for me is ticket delivery. If you are going to want to allow them to select print at home or have them all printed and mailed at the time of purchase, I am not sure how best to do that. Having the tickets printed at the time of order is likely to always cause some issue if you want that money to be properly reflected in Tessitura.
But if you are going to restrict mailing options, what about building an additional pricing layer into the ticket price? I suppose this is not SUPER seamless, and it would depend upon how many of these orders/tickets you expect to sell, but it does keep the money all in the right area. If you set the layer to be zero during the time all the members are purchasing, that would allow you to take any number of orders. Then, when the group is all done, you could go in and update that layer to include the other portion of the ticket price. That WOULD require you to go into those orders and re-pull the tickets so that they reflect the new price, and/or someone could mass update that through the database (not recommended, though it could be done, also why having the tickets as not having yet been printed at that time is important). But then you could bill the organization for the rest of the money, and each ticket would still then reflect the correct end price. As for getting a one payment from the organization and applying it to the individual orders, you could just apply that payment to a gift certificate that you just redeem on each order; there are other methods, but that seems the easiest.
After spelling it all out, I suppose, that does not sound like it is the best method, but I do think it would work.
John
We've done a similar setup before using pricing rules (although I don't see why you couldn't do it with a promo if you prefer). However you set it up, you do need to ensure that the tickets cannot be printed, like John said. We did this by creating a discounted pricetype that could only see the hold at box office or regular mail delivery methods using LTR_TNEW_DYN_SHIPPING_METHOD (print at home was not an option). If you do it using a promo/MOS flip, you can limit the delivery options in the TX_MOS_SHIP_METHOD table. Every morning, we had a scheduled report that pulled any orders with that discounted pricetype (in our case the pricetype was only used for this purpose, but if you did this using a promo code you could use an existing pricetype and pull a report using that source number instead). Then, before we printed the daily mail, we would enter those orders and flip any fields that needed to be adjusted prior to sending the mail. In your case, you would flip your pricetype back to full price, moneybag the payment to the subsidized payment type, and then you are free to print/mail the tickets.
Such great ideas - thank you both, John and Anna!