Hello!
We are revamping our artist merchandise sales and I am interested to hear how you handle this at your universities. In the past, when the artist would like help from us selling their merch we have been cash only. We are looking at moving to credit cards only.
We currently run our food and beverage concessions sales through Tessitura and so the first question my team had for me was, can we run artist merchandise sales through it too. I am very much against this because it would be a lot of work to set up for each performance. However, I think there might be a way to set it up with CD 1, CD 2, etc, and use editable price types but still a lot of setup.
We are also looking at purchasing a stand-alone card reader to run the cards through. We could then back-enter the sales into Tessitura the next day when there is more time. We are running into roadblocks with our university's accounting and IT departments but I think they will approve a device as long as it has its own data plan and does not use university wi-fi. We have been told that venmo, paypal, square are not options at this time but the university will revisit these policies soon. If the artist sells their own merch they are allowed to use venmo, square, etc as long as they use their own data plan and not university wi-fi. Has anyone gotten approval from your university to use paypal or venmo?
We are not looking at purchasing another POS like Clover.
The second part of this is settling up with the artists on the night of the event. Right now we have to cut them a check for their cut and mail it to them which is not ideal. I was hoping that we could use paypal for this but accounting says we are not allowed to set up our own paypal account.
To summarize, the main two questions I have are: How are you running credit cards for artist merchandise? How are you then settling up with the artist on the night of the performance?
Thanks in advance!
Hi Jessie,
We're interested in exploring this as well. We currently accept cash or check for merch sales and would love to do credit card as well, but are running into a lot of the same issues you've described. The only time we're able to accept credit cards is when the artist brings their own device(s) with the merch and then trains our staff/student in processing those sales. We often don't receive the merch until right before the performance begins, so any set-up in Tessitura would likely be challenging given the time crunch.
We are not allowed to use PayPal or Venmo either for those same reasons.
Since we do cash/check, all revenue from cash and checks is given directly to artists (we don't take a cut). We currently use a Google spreadsheet to track sales and cash flow on our end, but I would love another option for tracking if it exists.
Thanks,Alisa