One of our resident groups has decided to adjust price maps after already selling subscriptions. Most of their sales are subscriptions.
Obviously, already sold seats have the older price, but there are differences in the composite map also.
What they would like to do is update all of the prices, then put the difference in already sold seats into a new payment method to make it all balance.
Is this even possible?
Putting the extra money from those originally priced subscriptions into that payment method isn’t going to tell you how much money you are losing on the newly purchased reduced price subscriptions, though. That money you put into the payment method is money you actually received. The money you lose will be the difference between what the new subscriptions cost and what they would have cost before the price change. So unless I’m misunderstanding what you are doing or missing a piece of the plan, I’m not seeing of reseating all your subscriptions so they are at the new reduced price is going to get you the data you need.
My suggestion would be to create a new price type for the reduced prices and use that price type going forward. That way it will be easy to segregate your original price sales from your reduced price sales. You could then run a report to show you sales by price type to find out how many tickets were sold at the reduced price and then use then pretty easily calculate the money lost by multiplying the number of reduced price seats by the original price to calculate the potential money you could have brought in and then subtract from that the amount of money you actually brought in. If you have multiple price zones, the Performance Sales Analysis report will break down sales by price type and zone for you to help with your calculations.
You could also just change the price in the way Bob described in his response (expiring the old price maps and adding new ones), and on the Box Office Statement it will break out the different prices by zone without needing to create a new price type. The only drawback to doing it this way is that this report only reports on one performance at a time. But you will still have the number of tickets sold at the original price and the number of tickets sold at the new price making it pretty easy to do your money lost calculations.
I’m know there are other users out there who regularly change prices on the fly. Perhaps one of you could chime in on how you handle the reporting on revenue you lost after the price change. My theories are nice but your practical experience is even better.
To answer your question directly, though, you can’t save an order with a negative balance. You would place the money from the returned/released seats into an on account payment method to hold it and then use that on account money when you come back to the order later to reseat. That is the standard way to handle moving money around in this type of situation. And if you are go with just changing the price on the price map level (as opposed to creating a whole new price type) you should do it as Bob explained whether or not you end up redoing the subscriptions you have already sold.
Kevin Sheehan
Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
1 888 643 5778 ext 329 Office
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com