Event Cancellation Utility - Observations

Hi Everyone, 

We upgraded to Tessitura v15.1 about 2 weeks ago to begin using the Event Cancellation Utility and sort through the piles of ticket requests coming our way.  We have been using the cancellation utility since April 8th.  We made a few small mistakes but with a little bit of patience and careful observation to how it affects our process, we just today fully executed the utility from start to finish.  I am defining the start here as a departure from Excel surveys to transitioning some events to the Ticket Return Request button, CSIs written to Tessitura with patron's preference, list pulled, event cancellation utility running and closing CSIs, and finally issuing a return receipt back to the customer notifying him/her request is complete. It took some time but it all works! 

I thought I would notate a few observations that we have made internally and share those here so that others may benefit.  These may likely be a part of the documentation somewhere, but it may be helpful to read it in another format.

In the opinion of our TPAC team, our business practices and our reporting, the cancellation utility is best for single ticket performances without a subscription base -- special events, small runs without package sales. We do not like using this utility for any tickets that were sold as part of a package as the returns affect reporting. We are manually processing any return requests from subscribers but we do like lessening the work load with the utility. 

Without further ado, here we go: 

EVENT CANCELLATION UTILITY RETURN MODE: Original Credit Card Where Able

• Complimentary tickets will error out when returning to original CC. There is no credit card payment to be found. If you want to return complimentary tickets in bulk, run the utility in gift certificate mode on a performance. The tickets will go away and as there is no value, no gift certificate will be issued. 
  
  
• Any tickets where multiple credit cards were used (i.e. payment plans) must be manually returned. Even though the credit card may be identical for each payment, the utility does not know "which" card to return the payment to. This is listed in the documentation. 
  
  
• EXCHANGES must manually be processed if your organization typically exchanges tickets in a new order. 
  
  • When the exchange is an EVEN exchange, the utility will error out as there is no transaction history to reference. 
  • When the exchange is a DOWNGRADE and a fee is added to mop up the extra funds, the utility will error out as there is no transaction history to reference. 
  • When the exchange is an UPGRADE where the patron paid more money, the utility will error out.  The utility will only want to refund the difference of the upgrade and states, "Cannot refund - not enough money available." because it doesn't know what to do with the remaining funds.

EVENT CANCELLATION RECEIPT EMAIL UTILITY

• Cannot be sent once a batch has been posted. So if you have been issuing returns for a couple of weeks while waiting to get the kinks worked out of your HTML email return receipt, and now you cannot seem to push those backed up return sessions emailed out, try unposting the batch first. That fixed it for us! 

I am certainly no expert, but love the automation this utility has helped bring our team during this busy and difficult time. What have you learned?  Have you figured out a work around for your subscribers and use of this utility? Please add your own observations to this thread!