Our Ticket Office has been using the same performance codes that were carried over from Artsoft. Artsoft would sort shows by alphabet so they would group series performance codes by letter, which is is not intuitive for the ticket office staff and patrons to understand. Chamber Series performance codes are: 24RA, 24RB, 24RC our Piano series are 24PA, 24PB, 24PC. It does not tell you the date or information about the performance to help our staff decipher what show is.
We have using the same performance code for 15 years and we are wondering if changing the structure would ruin anything? Would it affect any reports? Will it break anything? Has anyone in this group gone through this change and can share their experiences? We want to know the pros and cons of changing the structure for next season.
Amber,
It depends on your reporting. If you have a lot of custom reports that use performance code, it could potentially shift things there. Also, out of the box, in the Orders module, Tessitura sorts performances BY performance code unless you have (as most staff members do; at least at our organization), their Preferences set to sort by performance date. So if your Box Office currently leaves them sorted by performance code that might be a significant change to ponder.
Otherwise, almost every out of the box report and functionality should not rely too heavily on the structure of the performance code. It is highly relevant for your own internal tracking, how things are organized in the Performance Set-Up and things like that. But everything else, including Analytics, really should have pretty reasonable equivalencies if you notice something looking slightly different there.
John A. Moskal II