John Fernandes, Group Sales Manager for Boston Ballet here. We currently are using version Tess 15.1.2. Recently I have noticed that whenever I make a change to an existing order (adding or deleting seats, adding a new line to charge for a tour or meet & greet, etc.), the price for the ticket changes to the current price. An example is that I had a client place an order for 160 Nutcracker tickets at $81 per ticket last March. When they were ready to pay their balance yesterday, November 15, they reduced the order by a few seats and I noticed in the sub ltem line that the price changed to $88 per ticket which is what the new dynamic price is. Is anyone else in groups having this problem?
Hi John,
Whenever you make a change to an order, any unprinted tickets in that order will be repriced. There are two possibilities for why the pricing in your orders would change when this happens.
The first is that your dynamic pricing was set up in a way that would apply to orders as of the order date on these old orders. That could mean that a price event was added with an effective date on or before the order date (which seems like an ill-advised choice or mistake), someone changed the home price on the tickets after the group orders were created (which generally you should not do after ticket sales start for reasons just like this, but maybe it was done in error), or a new price layer was added with a start date on or prior to the order date on these group orders (again, probably a mistake or an ill-advised choice). The key thing with any of these is that when orders are priced they always use the order date, not the current date, so existing orders should only be affected if pricing changes were made with start dates that would encompass existing orders. If any of these are the cause, the cleanest fix is probably to make the price type you are using editable so that you can manually correct the price in the order (rather than changing/correcting the start date on any of the dynamic pricing which could create additional, similar issues). And as a general best practice going forward, if you need to make changes to pricing after ticket sales have started, you should never change the Home price and the start date for the the change (price event or new price layer) should be after any orders that already exist (anywhere from tomorrow down to 15 minutes from when you are setting up the change are good choices).
The second possibility for a change to the pricing is that if you are using a seat volume pricing rule to manage your group price, releasing some of the tickets might drop the order below the minimum threshold for the rule, causing the rule to be removed and the price to increase as a result. This seems like a less likely cause, though, since the price you are seeing is the new dynamic pricing price. And if you aren't using pricing rules on these orders in the first place, it's an easy one to rule out.
I hope this helps. If after checking your dynamic pricing and pricing rule setup you still can't find the cause, I suggest opening a help ticket.
-Kevin