Hello!
So our standard operation procedure when donating tickets back is to donate them for resale and then print out a self created tax receipt through our BOCA printer. We do this because depending on the ticket sale, it was going to be a nightmare for accounting to track if this was a sub ticket or single ticket, along with all of the sub accounts related to each individual concert, etc etc.
This creates a unique problem in that we don't have a fund we can dump the donated ticket money into as the Event Cancelation Utility would require you to. I've wondered about what would happen if I copied the utility and edited it to not require a fund, just donate the tickets back with the "money" going nowhere, and hopefully it will stay on the ticketing end of our accounting.
Any thoughts, or does anyone know what the back end of this might look like?
(We are on RAMP)
Thanks!
Hi Dan,
This is David Struyf with the Tessitura Network Support team. I am posting Patrick's reply to your support ticket here for public visibility:
The Event Cancellation Utility's Donation functionality was designed to use Tessitura's native contribution processing features. The Donate for Resale feature is intended to be used when a seat is released for resale but the patron receives no money or benefits from releasing their seat. When Donating for Resale, money paid stays in the GL account defined for the price type, unless the seat is resold in which case the money from that resale would be placed in the price type's resale GL.
When money is moved to a contribution, you have better records of the fact that the patron made a contribution, as the money paid is moved to a fund and you can generate acknowledgements, add to a patron's yearly giving totals, etc. You can choose to set up a separate fund for these donations, or use an existing annual campaign fund and rely on source/appeal to track where the money came from.
Please let us know if you have any further questions
Cheers!
David
Thank's David!
Our problem is this - our Board, Senior Management, and Finance want to keep track of what concert everything came from, and if these tickets were originally Single tickets or subscribers, etc etc. That means in terms of moving over to the Devo side with a contribution, I'd have to create literally dozens of different funds to put the money into, not to mention make sure I'm donating back a single ticket or a subscriber ticket, etc etc. This is why I was curious as to if I could turn the fund designation requirement off. Would the event cancelation utility then treat it like a "donate for resale" transaction?
Hi Dan, as David mentioned, the Event Cancellation Utility uses the standard contribution functionality. It is creating a contribution record in the order. Contributions require a fund. If you were to make a copy of the utility and remove the fund parameter, the utility would fail when run in contribution mode.
Donating a seat for resale is a completely different process, which the utility was not designed to attempt, as donation for resale is generally not an appropriate approach if the performance is cancelled. Donating for resale presumes the seat could be resold, which in the case of a cancellation is not possible.
An alternative approach that may be worth considering is having a fund per production season and use the existing contribution functionality, but save the output? Alternately, if you're running the utility based on a list of constituents who have selected the contribution option, you could run a ticketing report (such as Perf Sales Summary by PT Category) filtered to that list prior to doing the cancellation and then you'd have a snapshot of the original state of the tickets in question.