Interested to see if anyone has come up with a clever solution to this issue. We have a chamber music series that is a member benefit (Not available to the general public). Members of a certain level are allotted a total of 4 tickets per season to be used for any of the 3 events (Members at lower levels pay for all tickets). After they use that allotment, they need to pay for any additional tickets. We have allocations in place that only allows members with a certain ranking to access seats on line, and a pricing rule in place that gives members with a higher ranking access to the free tickets. We do limit them in the pricing rule to 4 free tickets per order, but I don't think there is currently a way to limit the total number of tickets across multiple orders. There was also some talk of using either GC or On-Account money as a way limiting the number of tickets, but that seems both very labor intensive for the number of members we are talking about, and I don't like the idea of creating GC or On-Accounts with basically "Fake Money". Is anyone using a different method for this type of situation.
What version are you on? Tessitura has a custom Entitlements plug in which does just that. There is also a Ticket Limit plug in, but, I can't remember if it's for Web only. In V.16 though, I believe both functions are supposed to become standard.
Not on V.16 yet...I'm kind of hoping we can work with what we have until we upgrade. I did look at the plugins, but I'm not sure that's in the budget.
How about adding an auto updating suppression list of all the constituents who've already booked 4 tickets to the pricing rule? That would remove, in theory, their access to the price type. I don't know enough about lists to say if it's possible to pull a list that adds up tickets across multiple performances but it might be doable.
I actually just had a brainstorming session with a colleague and came up with the suppression list idea as well. So far, it seems to be working! Thanks for the help!
Hello Peter,
Question, how often does the suppression list run? As far as I can tell, the minimum amount of time you can set a scheduled report to run (updating the list) is hourly. It is better than nothing, but they could do as many orders as they want until the top of the next hour (assuming you have it run at the top of each hour).
The only other method that I can think of is creating a SQL Agent Job that somehow does this more often. I have not figured out how to do this yet, but it would be conceptually possible and would have to call a stored procedure to update the list.
Neil
Honestly, since its only available to select donors, I'm not too worried about people gaming the system, Right now I just just have it set to run once a day.