Hi all!
Hope everyone is doing well (or as well as we all can be) in this new semester! I was wondering if any of your Box Offices are cashless? If so, how was that transition? Recently we had to go through a several month process to get one customer who paid with cash a refund--so much red tape! There are also always going to be issues with reconciliation with so many people in/out of the cash drawer. Cash also doesn't make up a large percentage of our sales. The only concern I have is that it would make inaccessible to certain patrons and I do not want to alienate anyone who wants to attend our performances! I would appreciate anyone's advice/thoughts/opinions!
Best,
Olivia A.
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.
Thank you Jon!!