Version 6.63.02

Theatre Manager will

• Reorganize the database
• update new fields in shopping carts, season subscriptions, favourite seats and performance information

The user will need to

Web Sales

There have been a number of changes to the template web pages to support online subscription renewals. If you wish to see what they may look like, please visit the arts management web demo or a real life implementation of the sample at proctors theatre (2600 seat venue). At both web sites, you can browse for tickets without logging in. However, subscriptions have more rules about seat placement, so you will need to login (or create an account) to see the subscription pages. A sample of the renewal process is below

Clicking on 'Subscriptions' button to see available packages



Clicking on 'Buy Subscription' to select one gives the option to pick the series



Clicking 'Find Best Seats' will look for tickets available to the control house and all performances



Clicking 'Add Subscription to Shopping Cart' adds all tickets as a group

Some notes about subscription setup before event attempting to use them on the internet:

1. Look at the notes about setting up a season package and indicate which ones are available at the box office for new/renew and which are available online for new/renew.
2. Also, for the control house, indicate which performances are allowed to be sold on the internet as part of a subscription. This means you can enable most performance series, and disable opening night or previews, if you wish.
3. When searching online:
   • Subscriptions search for best seats in the control house. Once it finds those, it will then examine all other events to see if those same seats are available. If so, it will book them.
   • When the process finds seats available in the control house, it will hold those seats right away. Then the web listener will look at the others AND it ignores any hold status on those seats, should there be one. This means, you could hold your entire subscription for the season and the web listener will completely ignore the hold status. It only checks the availability in the control house.
4. It is very important, then, to make sure that the control house has the current seats sold or on hold that you want to keep for renewing subscribers. There is a fast way to hold all seats for renewing subscribers. After sending out season renewal notices, you can go to 'Theatre Manager->Season Reservations->Hold/Book Initial Season Seats'. This will display a window that follows. The key thing to do on this window are to 'Only Hold the tickets using the hold letter' (and supply a letter you thing would be good for indicating subscriber holds). You can run this as many times as you want with different criteria if you'd like different letters for each type of subscriber. Now all tickets will be held. (Make sure that the control house is IN the list of events for the subscription).
   

   

5. When the subscription is created by a customer on the internet, the Web Listener also updates the favourite seat locations and creates a subscription listing for the patron.
6. If the subscription was renewed AND the patron types in comments about their subscription, the Web Listener sets the status of the subscription as 'requiring a seat change' after booking the original seats. You will need to review those subscription renewals to finalize the subscription status.

Key changes made to the Web Listener:

• Added the ability to renew subscriptions on the internet. A preference must be set in the subscription window.
• Added the ability to create new subscriptions on the internet. A preference must be set in the subscription window.
• Each seat being released from a cart is now shown by performance and name on the web log for greater informational purposes
• added a setting in default data that lets you specify which kinds of sales an order fee can be applied to . This can be 'tickets' ,'gift certificates' or 'both'. There was already an existing preference for order fees. It has now been split into one for box office sales and one for internet sales so that they can be applied differently.
• The web sales module now refreshes the event list each time that a change is made to the play & dates window that affects which events are on sale for the internet. The web listener may not need to be stopped/started when adding or removing events from being on sale.

Updating existing web pages:

If you do not intend of adding subscription capabilities to your web site, then you will probably not have to make these web page changes at the moment. We do suggest making them. If you do not change the tmNavButtons.html file in tmTemplates, then no subscription capabilities will be enabled and the web listener will remain unaware of those functions. This means you can stage the implementation of this version and ignore subscriptions until you are ready to use them.

• You can update your pages to match the template pages by:
  • Download the sample web page folder for Mac or Windows
  • Install the sample web pages into a directory of your choice. You will need to specify the password you were previously given
  • Sort the pages by date. Compare the date on the pages to those in your web page folder.
  • Most of the changes to web pages in this installer are to get rid of extraneous <div></div> or <span></span> coding that really isn't required in a web page, or there is an alternate way of doing things that reduces the amount of text in a web page. If you have made modifications to your pages, do not use any of those that have changed.
  • You will, however, have to include the new web pages as described below
• Updated shopping cart (tmCart.html) to deal with an issue where patron could add a mailing fee to the cart, then removing everything out of the cart. After doing so, if the mailing fee was the last thing left in the cart, it could not be deleted. You can fix this by finding code that look like the following (in two places!) <field>pick(SCH_TIX_QUANTITY+SCH_PASS_QUANTITY+SCH_DONATION_QUANTITY>0 and changing it to <field>pick(SCH_TIX_QUANTITY+SCH_PASS_QUANTITY+SCH_DONATION_QUANTITY+SCH_ORDER_FEE_SCD_SEQ+SCH_MAIL_FEE_SCD_SEQ>0
• Added new files in TMTemplates as follows. These can be simply copied into the TMtemplates directory:
  • rowCartSub.html
  • rowCartSubNewGroup.html
  • rowSubNewDetail.html
  • rowSubNewHeader.html
  • rowSubNewNone.html
  • rowSubNoSeat.html
  • rowSubRenewFestival.html
  • rowSubRenewHeader.html
  • rowSubRenewReserved.html
  • rowSubReserve.html
  • setSALUTATION_LISTempty.html
  • setSUBS_SERIES_LIST.html
  • setSUBS_SERIES_LISTempty.html
• Added new files in tmFee as follows. These can be simply copied into the tmFee directory and modified to suit your needs:
  • tmBoxOfficePolicy.html
• Added new files in the WebPages folder that should be copied in and edited, if need be:
  • TMsysCookiesDisabled.html (new file - called if customer has cookies turned off)
  • TMSubscriptionsRenew.html (new file - for showing subscriptions)
  • TMsubscriptionsMap48.html (new file - sample for finding seats for a subscription)
  • TMSubscriptionsPriceMap.html (new file - for showing prices and letting customer pick price codes for subscription)
  • a new folder called tmSubscriptions
• Files that can be replaced in the WebPages folder, which already exist.
  • TMError.txt (added more error messages for subscriptions - do not replace this file if you have modified the error messages for your venue. Copy the additional messages into your file)
• Files that must be changed to enable the new functionality for web renewals
  • You must make a change to include the 'subscription' button in the navigation bar. The example is in tmTemplates/tmNavButtons.html

Season Subscriptions

• Added a field to the season subscription package that holds notes about the season subscription. Some comments about the subscription can be entered here and is available to the web pages for display about the subscriptions. This field is called 'Sales Notes'
• Added two flags for a subscription that allows you to set how it can be sold. You can now:
  • indicate if the subscription can be renewed at the 'Box Office' and/or 'on the internet'. This flag pertains to renewal of prior season subscriptions.
  • indicate if a new subscription can be sold at the 'Box Office' and/or 'on the internet'. This flag pertains to creating new season subscriptions.
• This means you can indicate if subscriptions can be renewed on the internet (but not sold as new subscriptions) - which means you can tailor how customers can set up subscriptions. For example; you might want a reserved seating subscription to be renewed, but if a customer wants a new one, it will be set up as a festival subscription and converted by the box office later.
• Fixed a problem where an attempt to insert a duplicate season subscription could cause TM to act funny. It now reports the canceling of inserting the subscription package properly and quits the process normally
• Added the ability to specify a plug in for subscription sales that controls how things are sold for that subscription.

Employee Preferences

• a]Added a new employee preference that allows you to prevent an employee from seeing past credit cards (the lookup button is hidden) and the credit card number is not suggested to the user. This is a new security function in employee data called 'Credit Card-able to use lookup button to see other cards'. (see highlighted line in image above). If this function is not permitted for an employee, that employee will not be able to see past cards and will always have to type the cards in at the payment window.
• Revised the name of the two other credit card permissions to start with the word 'Credit Card' (see lines 2 & 3) in the example. These function the same as before. They act as follows:
  • 'Credit Card-show entire card from history (else last 4 digits removed)' indicates when selecting a card from the history for payment on the payment window, should theatre manager display the entire card, or chop off the last 4 digits so that the operator can enter them. This feature is used to try to eliminate some card entry errors if operators are prone to making assumptions.
  • 'Credit Card-view entire number (otherwise **** & last 4 digits) indicates (when selecting a credit card from the popup list, or on the patron detail) if the cards should be displayed as '**** **** **** XXXX' (person does not have the privilege) or as the full card number (person does)

Ticket Sales

• Added a preference to each performance where you can indicate if the performance can be sold on the internet as part of a subscription. It is defaulted to on. If you turn it off, then that performance cannot be purchased on the internet as part of a subscription. Note; this currently only applies to those performances that are part of the control house for a subscription. In other words, if you turn it off on a performance for a control house, it applies to all similar performances in the subscription - regardless if the flag is set on those performances.
  • The key field to check (or uncheck) is the Allow tickets to be sold 'In a Subscription Package'
    
• Bug fix where people selling tickets that were held that they were not supposed to have access to could be released then resold later.
• Fixed a bug where a find best seat for multiple performances would suggest a seat, but clicking the 'reserve' button only reserved the first performance
• Fixed a bug in the plug ins that was not changing the promotion properly
• Completely revised the best seat algorithm and enhanced the priority search option. You can search by:
  • Best Seat. Theatre Manager searches for any seat, finding the first available from the best seat in the house to the worst.
  • Best Area. Theatre Manager searches for any seats and restricts it to a specific area
  • Best Priority. If you have set priorities on your seats in your venue, a search by best priority will find the seats at a specified priority before looking for seats at a lesser (or greater if that was checked) priority. This means that you can implement searches that consider aisles first, then balconies, then seats in the center at the front, then aisles further back, etc. etc.
  • or a combination of the above (If you include the Best Priority search, it takes precedence over all combinations and includes the Best Area, if specified.)
• added a setting in default data to specify how long theater manager will spend searching for best seats before returning 'no tickets found'. The default is 5 seconds.

Reports

• Added a new column to the Season Renewal statistics report to show those subscriptions that are in the process of being renewed on the internet, or that were cancelled on the internet.
• Added the PO number to the receivables report by order. It will display the first 10 or so characters of the PO number due to space limitations.
• Added the PO number to all invoice reports after increasing its size to 40 characters
• Bug for printing any of the count by postal code reports. There was a problem where if no criteria was specified for retrieving data, TM would not sort the data on the report properly.

Default Data

• Added a feature in the Accounting tab called 'Create User Audit Transactions'. If checked, Theatre Manager will record almost all events where one user (without permissions) has asked to do something and another user (with permission) has allowed that activity to occur. The kind of event is recorded as an 'AT' transaction (audit transaction) along with the employee initials requesting permission, the employee providing permission, and the message text that was offered to the employee asking to provide permission. Where possible, these transactions are tied to a specific patron and, if possible, a specific order. Transaction requests such as ticket unprint, or donation unprint are tracked by ticket (they have been for a long time) but now they may also be accompanied by a request to approve the unprint. All 'AT' transactions also appear on the transaction logs and transaction reports.

  

• The ability to separate when order fees have been applied is found on the Ticketing 2 tab (left side where it says 'Apply to:' and 'Box Office' and 'Internet'. You can now specify if the order fee is to be applied to tickets (at the box office) but not to internet sales, or vice versa.

  

• In Ticketing 1 tab is a setting for the maximum amount of time (in seconds) to spend in the 'best seat' lookup routines. For larger venues, 5-7 seconds should be enough. For venues under 500 seats or so, 5 seconds should be the maximum, 3 might be better. Note: The amount of time specified here is dependant on the performance of your network and machines. If you have a slow network or slow machines, this number might need to be higher.
• Once the best seat search is initiated, if no seats are found within the specified time, the search stops. If some seats are found, but are discarded because of surrounding single tickets, the timer is reset and the best seat continues on.

General Ledger

• Added a column to display the GL note on the GL list window.
• Added code to trim out leading and trailing spaces on the GL note to make it consistent with the other note fields in Theatre Manager

Miscellaneous Changes

• Fixed a bug in donations where if a donation was added on the internet, you could not add a matching gift to that donation at a later date.
• Added a feature to rebuild the patron statistics records from existing transactions if it felt that some transactions are not correct.