We are new Tessitura and trying to balance the number of price zones in our venues against the amount of time it will take to set up a performance and when building prices should they be layered or gross.
We do about 300 performances a year in a one off environment. Our two largest venues are in the range of 2,100 seats on three levels. We currently work with 8 different scalings per venue. As we move through the sales cycle for a performance we get into revenue management.
The questions we have are:
Do you use layered vs gross pricing?
If you use layered pricing, what is the process you follow to build and check prices?
Does anyone have an automated way of importing prices from excel for those venues who do layered pricing?
I agree that you want the setup to be right for the organization regardless of complication, and you want to look at your reporting needs before setting up your performances. That being said, there are ways to simplify some of your setup. If you have similar price maps you can copy as you build. If you do not need distinct GL numbers for the different performances you can use one price map on many different performances. Regardless of how many price map/GL setups you need I do recommend coming up with a naming convention that makes it easy for you to find what you need both for reporting and building.
Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss building strategies further.
Boann