Outlet Preferences

To access Outlet Preferences, go to Setup -> Outlet Preferences.

If you have Master User privileges, this will open the Outlet List Window. Each company that has been created as an outlet will appear to those who have access. Choose the appropriate company from this list to edit that outlet's preferences.

If you are not a Master User, you will immediately be taken to the Company Preferences window for your venue.

Selection of an Outlet will lead to the main Outlet Preferences Window for that Outlet.

At this point, setting up Outlet Preferences is the same as setting up Company Preferences for those sites which are not using the Outlet Edition of Theatre Manager.

Cross Outlet Policies and Rules

The following are basic "rules" regarding Outlets in Theatre Manager:

• There should only be one Master User account. The Master User is a "know all/sell all" account - that account can see all data, regardless of Outlet or "allow to sell at other Outlets" flag settings for performances. The Master User password should only be known by the Primary Outlet, and within the primary Outlet provided only to employees who are authorized to see potentially sensitive data for every Outlet (in other words - not many people should have this password).
• Only the Master User can add a new Outlet up to the license count.
• The Master User will be used to setup an Outlet Administrator to complete the main setup options for each respective Outlet. It is expected that Outlet sites will rarely need to use the Master User account after the initial setup of the following options, except to edit or change the Outlet Administrator accounts when necessary.
• Each Outlet requires an Outlet Administrator account.
• It is recommended that the Master User account is never used for selling tickets/donations/memberships or altering data (other than Outlet setup and new Outlet Administrator employees). If a high access level is required to alter/setup data, use the Outlet Administrator employee for that Outlet.
• Outlet Administrator accounts should be used to create employee accounts for his/her respective Outlet and to edit choices and setup preferences via Outlet Preferences for each outlet.

  'Outlet Preferences' is the same as 'Company Preferences' in a single-outlet environment. Outlet Preferences are accessed through the Setup Menu

• If an employee works for multiple Outlets, then that employee should have an employee record (still only one patron account) created for each Outlet.
• That employee will be required to log into the proper Outlet's employee record to have their activity and transactions recorded correctly.
• Only certain data is visible across Outlets (patron name and address, but not marketing data) to Outlet Administrator or Normal employee accounts. Click here for a specific list of which data is shared.
• A commission structure must be assigned to the sales promotions (even if the commission is set to $0.00) that are to be used for other Outlets selling the owning Outlet's tickets.
• Selling tickets for another Outlet requires the use of 'allow to sell at other outlet' on the Performance setup on an Event.
• Selling cross Outlets requires setup of some A/R accounts in the Default Posting Accounts in the Code Tables for 'Payments due from other Outlets', and various income accounts for other Outlets.
• Selling cross Outlets requires periodic reconciliation of sales from other Outlets.
• The "owning" Outlet for an event is able to Exchange or Refund any ticket for that event sold by another Outlet. Meaning that if a ticket for an event at Outlet A is sold by Outlet B, Outlet A may Exchange or Refund that ticket.
• An Outlet is able to Exchange or Refund the tickets that it sold for another Outlet - it is unable to Exchange or Refund a ticket that another Outlet sold.
• If a ticket sold by a Outlet A for an event owned by Outlet B is returned by Outlet B, any commission payable is cleared from the transaction and is no longer owed by Outlet B to Outlet A.
• Outlet A can sell an Outlet B ticket and take a payment. Outlet B can return the ticket but MUST USE THEIR OWN MONEY to do so. Only the Outlet's own money is in the their own till. That means you should use cash, check or credit card for payments to items that are for another Outlet. Using your own gift in kinds (contra, swag, pass or other non-physical cash), to pay for tickets for another Outlet isn't a suggested business practice.

  For example, 'Sure, we'll give you a ticket to the Outlet B -- and yes, we will let you use your Outlet A credit from your gift certificate.' This really means, however, that Outlet A will be 'out' the contra amount because, in the end, they will owe Outlet B real money for tickets they just gave away.

• Outlets cannot sell tickets 'On Account' for another Outlet.
• Theatre Maps are shared. They CAN be used among the various Outlets. But only the "owning" Outlet is allowed to change the setup (price codes, seat names, zone pricing, etc.). However, the Master User can duplicate a Theatre Map and re-assign the duplicated map to another Outlet. This will save the other Outlet from having to re-create an existing map that another Outlet has already created. This will then allow the other Outlet to alter the map for their own purposes.
• Tickets Faces are not shared, but the Master User account can be used to duplicate the ticket face and assign the duplicate to the other Outlet (just like with Theatre Maps, above). Then the other Outlet can alter the duplicated ticket face if they wish.

Shared Data Among Outlets

The Outlet Edition was written with privacy in mind; privacy from the point of view of the customer and each of the Outlets. Guiding principles are things like:

• Another Outlet should not be able to figure out how important a patron is to you or what they've paid you. Another Outlet has no business knowing anything about a patron's interaction with you for any reason unless the other Outlet sold the ticket to them, in which case it is reasonable that they should be able to return it. This rule exists because it is to the customer's convenience to return the ticket at the place of purchase. For details on what information is available to cross-outlet sales (and how you can find tickets sold to your events by other Outlets), click here.
• Everything is biased in favor of the customer and privacy. Laws are reasonably strict in Canada and are progressing that way in a number of states in the U.S., so Arts Management Systems wanted to make sure that we were on the right side of reasonable, not the wrong side.

The following is a list of data that is shared among Outlets:

• Patron Data
  • Patron households
  • Patron names
  • Patron phone numbers
  • Patron address
  • Patron primary contact setting (phone, address, fax, email)

Primary Address is set on a per Outlet basis. Meaning, if a patron tells Outlet A that their home address is their primary address, then it is their primary address for Outlet A. Outlet B may know the same person, but the nature of their relationship says that the primary address is a work address for that patron. It doesn't have to match.

If there is only one address for the patron, it is the primary address in both outlets.

So if you are Outlet B, for example, and Outlet A has put the patron in first, or it is in their database already and has two addresses, you get Outlet A's primary address as your primary address until you change it to be different for you. Changing the primary address selection in your Outlet will not change Outlet A's selection.

Changing the primary address setting can be done on the tab of the patron record or by opening the patron Contact Card.

The same goes for phone numbers. You can have different primary phone, web, fax and email addresses for a patron than another Outlet does. Changing the patron's primary contact information in your Outlet does not affect the primary contact information choices set by the another Outlet.



• System Setup Data
  • City lookup
  • Currency Conversions
  • System Preferences
  • Code tables
    • Country
    • Patron age codes
    • Patron location
    • Patron name suffixes
    • Patron salutations
    • Patron type
    • Province/state
    • Subscription Renewal Status
    • Transaction Types
    • Units of Measure
  • Employees Currently Logged ON
  • Disable Access
  • Data Utilities
  • System Activity

All other data is unique to each Outlet and needs to be maintained by each Outlet independently of the Primary Outlet.

Data that is not shared among Outlets

For privacy and security reasons, some data and functions cannot be shared among outlets. These include:

• Donations, Memberships, Mail lists, and Patron marketing data
• Orders cannot be seen by other Outlets unless those orders contain tickets sold to performances flagged as 'allow to be sold to other Outlets'.
• An Outlet cannot edit another Outlet's order.
• An Outlet cannot edit/delete another Outlet's payments.
• An Outlet is only able to sell 'Regular' type, priced tickets for another Outlet (i.e. no season subscriptions, no comps)
• An Outlet is able to Exchange or Refund the tickets that it sold for another Outlet - it is unable to Exchange or Refund a ticket that another Outlet sold. Another Outlet has no business knowing anything about a patron's interaction with you for any reason unless the other Outlet sold the ticket to them, in which case it is reasonable that they should be able to return it. This rule exists because it is to the customer's convenience to return the ticket at their place of purchase.
• Each Outlet can manage the permissions and privileges (Data and Functions within the Employee Profile) of their own employees, but cannot manage employees of other Outlets. If an employee works for multiple Outlets, then that employee should have an employee record (still only one patron account) created for each Outlet.
• Another Outlet cannot search for your events in the Event List window. Therefore they cannot see the Sales or Revenues tab (or any tab for that matter) in the Event setup for your events.

Allow Ticket Selling at Other Outlets

The Outlet Edition was written with privacy in mind; privacy from the point of view of the customer and each of the outlets. Everything is biased in favor of the customer and privacy. Laws are reasonably strict in Canada and are progressing that way in a number of states in the U.S., so Arts Management Systems wanted to make sure that we were on the right side of reasonable, not the wrong side.

That being said, as an Outlet sharing a database with another outlet, you have access to some of the information during the sales process. Examples include:

• If an outlet can sell tickets for another outlet, then they can see the sales map. That is required because we can't leave the sales agent 'blind'.... they need to know what is available in order to seat the person.

• You can design your seat letters in a way that makes sense -- like S for subscriber or G for group. For more information on Map Display Letters, click here.
• Tooltips work across outlets. You can run your cursor across seats and see the tooltip to show what patron is seated where. You can also right click on the seats and 'find all other seats in the order' to highlight where the person and their party are seated. This is more helpful for large groups.
• In the Outlet version of Theatre Manager, you may occasionally need to locate a patron's seat sold by another outlet in order to accommodate a seating request for a new buyer.

It should be noted that while another outlet can sell tickets to your events (if you allow them to), they do not have access to the financial data for that event. They cannot search for your events in the Event List window, and cannot view Revenues, Sales or any of the Event setup tabs.

Allowing sales at other outlets:

1. Setup a commission table (even if it's $0.00) that will be applied to sales promotions used at other Outlets.
2. Apply the newly created commission table to the sales promotions which will be used at other Outlets on the Calculation Tab.

3. The 'At Another Outlet' checkbox on the tab, which allows the Sales Promotion to be used at another Outlet, also must be checked.

4. Setup the new event following these steps.
5. On the Performance Tab of the Event Setup, click to allow selling At Other Outlets - Step 9 here.

6. On the Promotions Tab, be sure to enable the promotions you set up with the commission table created in Steps 1 and 2 above.
7. Optionally, you may also wish to edit the 'on-sale' date for other Outlets. This will allow you to change the date that tickets go on sale at other Outlets as opposed to yours. You can use this to your advantage by restricting the best seats to your venue, and setting a 'public' on sale date for sometime after you have had a chance to handle your members and other customers of your venue. By double-clicking on the performance once it is built, you can edit the Sales Management dates for your Box Office, the Internet and Other Outlets.

Web Sales in Outlet

In an Outlet environment, some Outlets may choose to have web sales, while others may choose not to. In addition, two or more Outlets may choose to share an Apache server in order to reduce costs for hardware assets. Or to take this further, if there are several Outlets, two may share one Apache server, three others may share a different Apache server, while other Outlets may choose not to have web sales at all. This is easily done since Apache has a great deal of capacity, and can service multiple Web Listeners without taxing the server.

Each Outlet can also have their own web pages to give their ticket sales site their own look and feel so that the branding of their ticket sales web pages matches their home website.

Having a separately branded site does not require separate Apache machines, but does require having separate Web Listeners, with at least one dedicated to each Outlet.

If Outlet B wants to sell tickets online, they can either:

• Have their own web site (Domain and Web Listener) and sell tickets through tickets.<outletB.org>/TheatreManager/2/. This allows them to have their own branding completely, or
• Use a common Domain, Apache Server and their own Web Listener and sell tickets through tickets.<outletA.org>/TheatreManager/2/, which means the initial branding will look like Outlet A, but they are completely separate web sites after that.

If Outlet C wants to sell tickets, they can choose NOT to have a web site at all and allow Outlet A to sell online tickets for them. If that is the case, the tickets will appear in Theatre Manager as 'sold by Outlet A.'

If Outlet C plans to use ticket scanners at their venue, because sales data is not shared between Outlets, Outlet C will need to set up its own web listener(s); scanning is not possible at an Outlet which does not have its own web listener.

Scanner Setup for Outlet

In an Outlet environment, two or more Outlets may choose to share an Apache server in order to reduce costs for hardware assets. This is easily done since Apache has a great deal of capacity, and can service multiple Web Listeners without taxing the server.

However, because there is data that is not shared between Outlets, scanning tickets at Outlet B presents some interesting challenges when web sales are resident at Outlet A.

If Outlet B wants to sell tickets online, they can choose to not have a web site and allow Outlet A to sell online under Outlet A. If that is the case, the tickets appear as part of Outlet A's sales (and therefore may be subject to commissions). This also means that Outlet B cannot scan tickets for their events.

If Outlet B plans to use ticket scanners at their venue, because sales data is not shared between Outlets, scanning will not be possible for Outlet B events without using their own Web Listeners.

The only way to accomplish scans at Outlet B is to have a Web Listener dedicated to Outlet B and setup scanning either for

• A single domain (using a separate Apache server for each Outlet), or
• A common domain (using a common Apache server for multiple Outlets), and set separate web sales folders for each Outlet.