Does anyone have experience going cashless/checkless?

Olivia, we haven't gone cashless, simply because we offer Pay-What-You-Can performances, and for the mentioned above financial accessibility reason. We want to provide as many options as possible, and not limit anyone's ability to go to the theatre by putting up any unnecessary roadblocks or friction. We run a google doc "cash drawer" report that student assistants fill out at the end of each day so we track cash, and make daily deposits. You could also make it an "end-of-shift" drawer that each person fills out so that you can track where things went wrong in the event you are over/under for investigating purposes...The challenge for us is keeping a change fund in place. 

When we've had to issue a refund to a customer after a prolonged period of time (who paid with cash), we go through our university's cashier to cut them a check which often works best, and may be what you had to do. We still have so many older patrons that prefer to pay with cash.

Our new ED wants us to go cashless. I am very much against it. He says it is to protect the students but then he wants there to be much more supervision of them. I am against it for the exact reason you stated. It could make our performances inaccessible to under-resourced individuals. I would never want to turn someone away because of it. It is such a small part of our sales too!! We have maybe brought in $50 this year in cash. Even pre-pandemic it was such a small amount. However, we have run into the same problem with refunds. Cash and check refunds have to go through at least three campus departments which does cause quite the delay. Even though I have explained the process to patrons they still call once a week to ask where their refund is. Cash is even harder because, before the pandemic, we may not have attached a name to the order if they walked up the night of the show. That isn't a problem now since we have to get contact info for contact tracing. 

I'll also add, I'm not sure we could ever go checkless. We have put subscriptions on hold for now, but I would say at least 50% of our subscriptions are paid with a check. I think our patrons would mutiny if we stopped taking checks!! Our demographics are very attached to their checkbooks.

Thank you Jon!!  

Thanks you Jessie!  Yes, the main issue we had with cash was a refund for one customer that took months--and they definitely checked back frequently! :) 

We are now cashless and the cafe in our venue is cashless too.  For PWYD events we would have option for customers to PWYD before they come when they book their ticket and then for any who are paying after, keep our boxoffice open to take card payments.  We also have a mobile pdq terminal to add as extra.  I would add though that our PWYD events are for fairly experimental stuff so we wouldnt run that kind of event if it were going to be for a sell out performance. So we are only looking at about 200 people max (if no one at all were to have paid online before) and in view of those to pay poss being split up into parties of 2 or 3, would result in about 100 card transactions maximum, which split over 3 terminals doesnt take that long if audience are coming out in dribs and drabs.

If we were to take cash now (post covid) anywhere on our venue, one of our team would now have to go down to the bank themselves to bank it. Which to be honest, probably costs more to send the member of the staff to the bank than the value of the money that they are taking down there! Our customers have got used to it, even the "cash generation" individuals - we rarely get any negative feedback. Had we done it prior to covid it might have been a different story.

Thank you Lianna!  That is one of our thoughts as well--several places on campus are cashless.  I appreciate your insight!