COVID-19 has affected the arts, entertainment and sports industry, probably more than most. We offer some thoughts how you can address it in Theatre Manager.
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Before you do any refunding, please make sure to set up gift certificates and donation campaigns to track refunds appropriately if you are not giving money back.
Do not leave the order on account. |
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VERY IMPORTANT: BEFORE REFUNDING PAYMENTS TO CREDIT CARDS...
Please read the rules regarding refunds to credit cards, which are managed by your credit card provider. Theatre Manager does its best to determine which refund rule applies, based on how the card was authorized. If you cannot get refunds working, your merchant provider is the key to unlocking the door. |
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if you receive a message from Theatre Manager there are NO PRIOR PAYMENTS when doing a refund, the root cause is because merchant providers have been forcing venues to use linked refunds, meaning they imposed a typical time limit of having to refund within 120 days of purchase. In these times of crisis, each venue seems to have a different time limit and you can set it in Theatre Manager's Merchant Setup. It may work if you increase the time frame. If not, you may need to talk to the bank to have them raise the timeframe on their end as well. |
This method automatically adjusts the holds depending on what the patron buys - and is the recommended approach - but it requires a bit more venue setup to make it automatic.
A very important feature of the automatic method is that you can use reporting capacity for the price map to limit the total overall seats sold for a performance to meet governmental limits - the reporting capacity can be set to ignore social distance holds. This makes it very easy to limit sales to a specific number when sold online. (Box office is allowed to ignore limits if need be)
This also requires setup, and does not guarantee that people will have a safety barrier if the box office releases some seats inadvertently. It can be set up more quickly - and might be used as a stop gap until you build an automatic social distance map.
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You can use the zone number entry process for reserved seating whether you are using social distancing sales process or not. |
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Automatic social distance holds has been a feature of Theatre Manager for quite a while - primarily for use for dinner theatres and ADA seating. You may even be using this feature on some of your maps. |
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NOTE: If you have permanent house helds (eg for light board), DO NOT set social distance seats for permanent holds. Instead, set the rest of your social distance seating as if those seats never existed. If you want to make permanent holds look like they are blocked online, set the hold letter to 'q'. |
In the context of social distance sales and COVID19, you can create an empty seat barrier around each seat. If you do:
The following is a recommended process for doing social distance seating:
My Main Venue to something indicator to the patrons like My Main Venue with automatic social distance
For example: this lets you set an absolute limit of 100 sold seats in a venue, regardless of how many social distance seats are required to make that happen.
There are two icons, one for each of
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This technique can be used to reduce venue size down to government mandated levels by adding enough mandatory holds.
We recommend the automated social distancing approach as it handles spacing automatically - but it may not be for every venue. |
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You might start out with a pattern of seats that create distance .. and as the performance fills in, you can re-adjust the holds based on purchased seats |
Some clients may be continuing with events and implementing Social Distancing within the Theatre. One approach to this process is holding seats within the venue to not only limit the number of patrons who can attend but also offer more space between seats for those attending. Local officials will determine the recommended distance between patrons and seats.
Distance between patrons in a performance can be created by holding seats. Depending on where you are in the process the options below outline how to create holds:
An organization may decide to create a Social Distancing map. This map would contain held seats to meet the regulations outlined by officials for group gatherings. Upcoming events can be altered to use this map. When capacity regulations are lifted the map can be updates once more to return to the original configuration or holds can be released within the performances themselves. The process for implementing a Social Distancing map would be:
Some organizations may choose to move from Reserved Seating to General Admission / Festival Seating to allow patrons the option to create distance between themselves and others attending a performance. Click the Changing a Performance from Reserved to General Admission Seating link for details steps.
By default Theatre Manager displays unavailable seats on the map using a Font Awesome icon that appears in the shape of a person. This icon is used for both sold and held seats. The default icon works well under traditional circumstances where we are holding seats to manage how the house fills, to block off sections or to be booked at a later date using complimentary tickets. However, when implementing social distancing the icon may create the illusion of sitting next to another person when in fact the seats will remain empty. For this reason we recommend editing the web pages and changing the icon for seats that are currently unavailable.
The web pages to edit may not currently be customized for your organization. If this is the case you'll need to download the most recent default pages and copy the pages into the WebPagesEN/tmMaps folder on your Primary Web Listener computer. Once the pages are in place you can then make changes to the content. The pages and edits are outlined below:
The icon currently displayed on the page can be updated to any of the available options on the Font Awesome website. In this example the default icon is replaced with an asterisk. The values for an asterisk are  and fa-asterisk. Once replaced, Clear Web Cache in one of two ways:
If your organization has implemented steps for Social Distancing not listed above we would love to hear about them. Please contact the support team and let us know what you are doing to help limit risk.
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Refer to the section on live streaming using content delivery services where the event is setup and sold in Theatre Manager, and the customer is delivered the content automatically. |
An outline containing recommendations for managing event cancellations can be found in the help page Cancelling an Event. These recommendations include generating Revenue and House reports prior to refunding tickets and creating a Mail List of those patrons who have purchased for future reference.
You can refund tickets and create an offsetting payment, donation or add a gift certificate/pass in three ways:
When cancelling an event there are many options for dealing with currently purchased tickets.
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Before you do any refunding, please make sure to set up gift certificates and donation campaigns to track refunds appropriately if you are not giving money back.
Do not leave the order on account. |
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VERY IMPORTANT: BEFORE REFUNDING PAYMENTS TO CREDIT CARDS...
Important: Please read the rules regarding refunds to credit cards, which are managed by your credit card provider. Theatre Manager does its best to determine which refund rule applies, based on how the card was authorized. If you cannot get refunds working, your merchant provider is the key to unlocking the door. |
When a patron calls in, you have several options for refunding tickets based on their needs. These include:
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VERY IMPORTANT: Before refunding to gift certificates or donations, we suggest making a new and explicit gift certificate or donation campaign to track the refunds. |
If you intend to cancel an entire entire event, you can:
-or-
Remember to generate all Reports or Mail Lists about those patrons who have purchased prior to following these steps should you wish to contact them in the future.
You can search for and create a custom list of tickets in the Batch Functions->Unprint or Refund batch of tickets. This option let you:
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If you don't know the future date of the postponed event, we suggest simply changing the name of the event and add '(postpoend)' to the title.
If you are doing deferred revenue accounting:
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You will need to:
Once you have changed the performance dates for the desired events to the future, you should do an email blast to all patrons for those performances listing when their new performance is. You might wish to:
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We suggest adding the following link to your email or mail correspondence so that patrons can go online and see their future performances and tickets. The link will show the web page below (after the patron signs in)
https://[tickets.yourvenue.org]/TheatreManager/1/online?futuretickets |
The example below shows that the future tickets web page looks like when a customer logs in online. They can see their events with the new dates, along with the ability to print tickets at home. If you change many tickets for many events, this might be the best thing to direct customers to, so that they can print their own.
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Please refer to the section on course management called Refunding a Partial Amount for a Course for details.
Effectively, you:
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Please refer to the section donation quicklinks to find out how to create a single link that quickly adds a donation to a shopping cart.
Using quick-links enables you to do things like:
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It is a very good question. There is no one report that can tell you all this, primarily because of the fundamental nature of how accrual accounting works. But if you refund to donations or gift certificates, there is a way get reports for this
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Before you do any refunding, please make sure to set up gift certificates and donation campaigns to track refunds appropriately if you are not giving money back.
Do not leave the order on account. |
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Theatre Manager uses accrual accounting. In simplistic terms, it means a payment only pays down the balance of an order - you cannot tell how a particular ticket was paid for. Please read a detailed explanation
When trying to report on refunds, a similar dilemma occurs. If you refund some tickets in an order that contains donations, passes, or other items, you cannot tell exactly what the refund was for, since it only decreases the balance payable on the order to the patron. |
The following sections describe:
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Before you do any refunding, please make sure to set up gift certificates and donation campaigns to track refunds appropriately if you are not giving money back.
Do not leave the order on account. |
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You can tell how much you refunded to an event using the Transaction history by event report (see also the youtube video explanation).
However, this report only tells you how much you refunded, and not what you refunded money to. |
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You can refer to reports that show where money went if you've refunded tickets to passes, gift certificates and/or donations. |
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VERY IMPORTANT: At a minimum, we suggest refunding the money to gift certificate or a donation that you give a very specific name to - which can then be tracked.
The mass refund of tickets option supports return to gift certificate or donation. Do not leave the order on account. |
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EQUALLY IMPORTANT: If you want to track refunds by event, make a separate donation of gift certificate for each event that you are refunding and take care to refund only tickets to the appropriate campaign or gift certificate. |
By way of short example:
If you create one or both of these below, then refund tickets and buy:
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If you refunded all tickets to donations or gift certificates, you can get an accurate sense of what you exchanged things to using a report from one of three report categories:
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Any difference between ticket refunds and purchases of gift certificates/donations means that the patron received their refund by cash/card/or check. |
How much ticket money was refunded? |
If you want to simply find the total value of tickets refunded and who you refunded them to refer to the transaction history report
If you want to see how much you refunded on a daily basis or by event, use
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How much was returned to gift certificates? |
You can use this data to:
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How much was returned to donations? |
You can use this data to:
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How much was returned to cash or credit card? |
Very simply, the difference of the
Total Ticket Refunds - Total Donations to COVID campaign - Total purchases of COVID Gift Certificates = Total Refunds to Cash and Credit Card. Ultimately accounting reports in your accounting system should tell you the net difference because the data comes changes to your accounts. These can be backed up with the GL reports, the daily sales summaries and the other reports mentioned above. |
Some key ones are:
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Please read the steps of cancelling an event for more information |
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If you have refunded some of the tickets to a donation or a gift certificate and want to find out the amount returned to the patron, then:
Total tickets returned - total donations purchased (for ticket return) - total gift certificates purchased (for ticket return> You can get all this from transaction reports. |
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Before you do any refunding, please make sure to set up gift certificates and donation campaigns to track refunds appropriately if you are not giving money back.
Do not leave the order on account. |
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HOWEVER: if you did not:
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If you just left your orders on account when doing tickets refunds, you will have a lot of orders or patrons that show:
If you didn't make a new gift certificate or pass to track ticket refunds for COVID, then:
If you didn't make a new donation campaign to track ticket refunds for COVID, then:
You will need to:
Note: any attempt to try to extend a pass or gift certificate that never expires will be ignored UNLESS you:
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Hosting Options:
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Various ways of accessing the database remotely are outlined in Remote Access to Theatre Manager and refers to some considerations to maintain PCI compliance.
Comprehensive Links are provided in the page above, as well as some key technologies below for convenience. |
While there are many vendors of remote access software, the ones that we see used most often are:
The following three steps indicate how to install on your home computer: