When selling tickets for clients (internal or external), how often do you distribute ticket sales back to the client? At the end of the performance/run, on a weekly or monthly basis, or at another interval? And what Tessitura report(s) are you running for your clients and yourself to get the final ticket sales amount to distribute? The UVA Arts Box Office historically has been moving funds to our internal clients on a daily basis, but with upcoming changes to UVA's financial system, we finally have a chance to change up our processes so I’m reaching out to different universities/orgs to see how they handle this.
I appreciate your input here!
Jenny MaysSupervisor, UVA Arts Box OfficeManaging Director, Virginia Film Festival
Hi Jenny,
At the University of Colorado, we handle fund transfers to internal clients in two different ways:-For our academic programs, we typically do a revenue transfer approximately 1 week after the run of a given production ends. This allows for a day or two of "dust settling" from a customer service perspective (such as a patron requesting an after-the-fact exchange or refund). These programs do not have an immediate fiscal need for the money in cash, so the waiting period does not cause an issue.-For our professional summer theater rep company, cash flow and income is more important, so we perform our revenue transfers once a week on Tuesday for all the performances in the previous calendar week. This gives us at least 24 hours after a Sunday performance for those after-the-fact calls, but still groups the transactions into a bulk transfer, analysis and reporting project. For reference, we support almost 200 ticketed events per year on campus, all of them run by internal partners who need a revenue transfer; if we did a daily-basis model, this would take up a much greater amount of staff time than batching our transfers together.
I forgot to add, in terms of reporting, we typically use Performance Sales Summary by PT Category and Payments by Performance reports to determine the amount of each transfer by performance. Most of our partners are not interested in a breakdown by individual price type when revenue is transferred, so we forego a performance sales analysis at the time of revenue transfer. Instead, we provide weekly reports and on-demand requests for price type details (if, for example, a department wants to know how many of their tickets are sold to students).
This is so helpful, Andrew! Thank you very much for sharing!!