We have been using Auto-bill in both our Development and Ticketing departments for about 2 years. We have been separating the functions, running the ticket payments through Ticketing and donations through Development.
To provide better customer service, we now want to bundle tickets, annual campaign contributions, and development special events (non-ticketed), thereby charging the customer only 1 payment a month instead of separate payments from ticketing and development. We currently use the “on account” method for any development related funds in a ticket order. We do not want to use the Invoice payment method in ticketing because we are not going to print any tickets until the order is paid in full.
Does anyone currently have a procedure for a transaction like this?
Thanks,
Susan
Hi Susan,
It is not possible to use an On Account payment method for contributions in ticket orders with order billing. The billing schedule total must equal the order total. Technically, you could add a contribution to the Contributions tab of a ticket order and then include the contribution in the order total and billing schedule, but there are a couple of potential problems in doing so. First, that contribution would not be processed as a pledge. It would be processed as a gift, and the gift is not processed until it is fully paid (so you wouldn’t see it anywhere except on GL reports until the full gift amount was received). The second problem is that money is applied to contributions in a ticket order first and tickets last in a ticket order. As a result, you wouldn’t show any ticket revenue as received until after the gift was paid in full and if the pledge term went past the point when you print tickets you wouldn’t be able to print the tickets.
Practically speaking, the only way to do it all as a single billing schedule is with an invoice. You would then also be able to continue doing on account contributions. The only potential drawback is that the orders and the contributions would be marked fully paid before you’ve actually received the revenue (which also means that these contributions will still have to be entered as gifts instead of pledges).
I know that better ability to handle ticket sales and contributions in a single transaction is on the wish list for the Next Generation project (not v11, but one of the releases after that), so if this is something important to you, I suggest investigating how you can add your input when they start to build the roadmap for those future releases. You can learn about the Next Generation project and how to participate here.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
Thanks, Kevin, I appreciate the quick answer.