Hello friends,
My name is Chris and I am at Des Moines Performing Arts. We are a presenting organization/performing arts center. We recently had our TMS kick-off call and were made aware of some things we did not know about from our prior meetings with Tessitura about TMS. We are hoping that some of you fine people are at a presenting organization/performing arts center and can help us with these questions.
Here are some of the hurdles we need to overcome:
1. We learned that you cannot do a refund by credit card number, only by CCRef number and using the refund button. While this makes sense, we will also be having quite a few Broadway shows that tickets were sold through WorldPay that we may need to refund and we do not want to issue checks (because of the liability of waiting for guests to cash them and for the customer service that that is not). Have any of you found any ways to overcome this?
2. We learned it is recommended that all returns/refunds/exchanges are done in the original order. We do not currently do this (for a myriad of reason) and trying to wrap our head around how this would affect reporting (as it's already very difficult to report on refunds and exchanges). If you are like us, and have done exchanges, refunds, and returns in a new order, could you share your process for changing to everything in one order and any bumps and hurdles you experienced?
3. We currently have our credit cards setup (for controls and reporting) so that there is credit card payment method for each way to buy (phone, internet, window/in person). We do this because it is a very easy way to do settlements with our presenting organizations, especially touring Broadway. If you also had your credit card setup this way, what hurdles and bumps did you run into for reporting and settlement with this new behavior?
4. We learned that on one-page giving for TNEW, credit cards are not save automagically if the guest is signing up for sustaining giving. Instead, we have to call the guest to get that same credit card to enter into the payment plan that is the sustained giving. Have any of you found ways to overcome this? We don't see this as donor friendly and would definitely be more work for our Devo staff to make sure they call and get those credit cards.
Thank you everyone for any and all answers.
Hi Chris. I can't speak to numbers 2, 3, and 4 because we either don't do those things or we're not set up that way, but I can speak to number 1. We moved to TMS from Windcave in 2022 in the middle of our season, so we had a lot of subscribers exchanging and refunding. Unreferenced credit card refunds (for transactions prior to cutover) can be refunded by entering the constituent's credit card information in the EMV reader, either by swiping/tapping, or keying in the number. This is only available for 90 days post cutover. After that, you'll have to issue a check.
For #3 you can still have your separate payment methods in Tessitura, but they all go to a single merchant on the Adyen side. We had and still have different payment methods in Tess for each department. We used to have separate merchants in Worldpay but now just have one. In my opinion it has made reconciling between Tessitura and the payment processor easier. Especially because Tessitura provides a handy excel helper document with all the formulas and wizardry built in to reconcile the two reports for you. I love it.
Hi Chris,
To speak a bit to #2 - Refunds in particular must be done in the original order because you are *refunding by reference*. It's a bit of a logic shift, as you are no longer refunding *to the card* but instead *refunding to the original payment*. Does the payment still hit the original card - yes - but TMS/Adyen isn't looking for the card to refund, but instead the payment (In Adyen, you search by PSP Ref No - you're searching for the *payment* - the card information is secondary). In this post: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/topical_groups/payments-transactions-tessitura-community/f/discussions/33674/tms-refund-flow-chart?_ga=2.137691447.648990084.1706620964-150994199.1705334633 I have linked to the refund flow charts I made for our consortia when we transitioned to TMS. This chart also touches a bit on what Allison described - this 90-day "unreferenced refund" window. Also to Allison's point - you can always refund via a non-credit card payment method. But in order to refund to the card, the refund has to be in the order with the original payment. Happy to help with any other questions! Also the Payments and Transactions Group is a great resource too!
Best,
Katina
Pittsburgh switched to TMS in May of 2023. If you'd like, I'm happy to chat with you a bit about our experience. We had a similar reaction after our kick-off call
1. As Allison said, you do have 90 days during which you can do an unreferenced refund. Katina White built a lovely decision making flow-chart for our users to figure out how they needed to do any refunding. But, after that 90 day mark, you have to refund to some other payment method: check, gift certificate, on-account credit.
2. The refund in the original order piece was a big change for us as well and where we landed was if you are refunding to the cc, you have to be in the original order. If you're exchanging and no money is going back to the patron, new order. (I will admit that on a few occasions, we've had to go hunting for what order the money is in when what began as an exchange needed to be refunded later, but those have been one off orders). What helped me (can't speak for anyone else here) feel less twitchy about this is that if you use the event cancellation utility, it is affecting the original order, not creating a new one, so this matches up those scenarios.
3. If I'm understanding this correctly - you aren't talking payment method groups (ticketing/development/education) you have actual payment methods based on the channel through which the order is created, yeah? We don't have that, but Nancy Sheleheda did have to create a LOT of payment methods because of our consortium setup, but since you're no longer selecting a payment method from the dropdown for a credit card, I don't think there's a way to accomplish that.
4. We are a custom site, so I can't speak to the TNEW piece.
Since there is no "test environment" for the transition to train people, we hosted daily training sessions the week before we went live that we phrased as "for anyone who ever puts a credit card in Tessitura." We recorded them and had those recordings available for anyone that couldn't make it in person, but I would say that almost everyone that processes cards in our consortium joined one of those meetings. And we learned a lot during that week as well when people would ask questions and we'd go back and figure out an answer and then add it into the presentation for the next day. While this cut a lot of additional time out of our teams' days, it really paid off b/c those muscle memory changes are big and communicating them in an email or something would not have had the impact we needed it to have.
If you want to chat at all, let us know. We're happy to share our slide deck and answer any other questions you might have.
-Katie
Hi Chris and everyone else! I wanted to provide a quick clarification on refunds.
It is possible to return and exchange tickets paid via Merchant Services in new orders, and in fact we recommend using new orders in most cases. When you start a new order by refunding a ticket (either via the seat map or Return by Ticket Number) and some money needs to be refunded back to the customer, the Refund function will work.
However, once the new order is saved, any further refunds from those tickets cannot be processed using the Refund function (aka Refund Prior Payments or Refund by Reference) in that order. For example, if you returned tickets in a new order, put the balance on the constituent's account, and saved the order, you would not be able to later refund the on account balance with the Refund function in that order. Or, if you exchanged tickets in a new order and saved it, and then later tried to refund the new tickets, you would not be able to refund the balance with the Refund function in that order or another new order.
The link to the original payment only exists in the original order, or when you initially create the new order by returning some tickets. This link is required to use the Refund function. Please let us know if that's not the case for you.
And lastly, let's say that you do have some tickets that were exchanged in a new order and the order was saved, but now you'd like to refund them back to the card from the original order. You can consider the following workaround, in consultation with your finance department. I will admit it's a lot of steps and might not be appropriate for every ticket seller to attempt, but it can be handy when needed.
Hey Michael,
Thank you for taking time to put this down in writing. It helps being able to read it out like this. I think it's all starting to make sense. It's unlearning decades of learned behavior and re-learning new ways to do things.
I'll dig into this and ask any clarifying questions, should there be any.
Thank you everyone for all your advice and insight. It's helpful in relearning how to do something that has been done a certain way for sooooooo long. LOL
Hi Chris, regarding #4, which I don't think anyone answered, right now the Alliance Theatre sustainer society uses the old donate/contribute1 TNEW pages instead of one page giving, where it makes you login before you checkout, so you can save the card there, though it's not particularly intuitive. There may be some reasons regarding logins or legal-ese that it doesn't happen on one-page giving, but I agree it would make sense if possible.
-Henry