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,
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