Hello Tessitura Network!
One of our consortium's member organizations is looking into overhauling their ticketing refund policy so that programs which have to be cancelled have the ticket amounts put On Account in Tessitura and are available to be directed by the patron within a set period of time or else the money is applied as a donation.
Thankfully, the standard utility for Performance Seat Release accomplishes the first part of the equation by taking the ticket amounts and putting them On Account; however, there doesn't seem to be a "matching" utility which could then be use to direct those On Account funds in bulk to a Fund. This is a key part of their work towards the policy, because they don't want to have to manually process hundreds or thousands of On Account funds to contributions in Tessitura for single events which get cancelled.
Does anyone have experience in working these On Account funds after an event is cancelled, specifically with an eye towards bulk applying remaining On Account funds to designated Funds?
Thank you,
Brian
Hi Brian,
You could experiment with an approach like this: After the set period of time for customers to use the money is over, you could run the On Account Tracking report to gather up the remaining balances, and save the result to CSV. The key columns would be the constituent ID and the balance. You could manipulate this file to fit the format of the Contribution Import Utility, and then import these contributions using the same On Account payment method. Ideally, each customer's contribution amount matches their On Account balance. Once you get the batch in, you would adjust the batch totals (since On Account money isn't counted in the totals) and close/post the batch. You would obviously want to try this in your test system first and carefully check that the balances are reduced correctly and the gifts look the way your fundraising team requires.
-Michael Flaherty-Wilcox, Tessitura Network
Thanks for this suggestion, Michael Flaherty-Wilcox! We'll take a look at testing on our end.
I know this was a while back, but I was wondering if you got this to work for you? I am looking at doing something similar.
Jen
Hi Jen!
We did get this to work, which was handy. We haven't done it very frequently, but I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you might have about it.
Just looking for any assistance on it. How you went about it, formatting etc. I haven't done any contribution imports in my system. Only a couple order imports.
Hi everyone!
In our next service pack, we will have a utility that takes money from a specified On Account method, and distributes it to another payment method, such as CC refund, gift certificate, contribution, check or other. It is very similar in practice to the Event Cancellation Utility that we recently released, but instead of a ticket return being the source of the funds, it is money that is on account for a patron.
Thanks!
Chris Szalaj
Product Owner, Business Facing Products
Tessitura Network
Brilliant Chris!!!!
Can't wait. My poor overworked data entry hands will be forever in all of your debt. Any idea when that will be coming out?
Hi Jen, June Service Pack (15.1.11/15.0.18) is currently due out at the end of next week.
Thanks,
Chris