Version 7.18.00

Theatre Manager will

• Add some new database fields

The user will need to

7.18.00 Changes & Enhancements (Jan 11)

• Patron: fixed the display of the 'year from/to' for volunteer hours and donations. It was displaying correctly if your fiscal year setting was at the start of a year. however, if your fiscal year setting is at the end of the year, the data was correct, but the prompts in front of them were off by one year.
• Outlet: Fixed the sales process so that only sales promotions enabled at other outlets will be available at the other outlets. A number of other rules have been implemented to ensure ticket sales can only occur at other outlet if Theatre Manager is properly set up. If the rules below are not satisfied, then a sale at another outlet cannot occur. Promotions available at other outlets now:
  • must have a commission record associated with them
  • must be active
  • the commission record for that promotion must be active (if you inactivate a commission, all promotions associated with it will no longer be available at the next ticket sale)
  • the commission record must allow commission to be paid to another outlet (even if that commission is zero)
  • the commission record must be enabled for the ticket sales source. In other words, if the commission setup is only available at the box office (and not the internet), then any promotions associated with the commission will only be available at the box office and not on the internet REGARDLESS if the promotion is enabled at the internet or not
• Commission Calculations: Fixed an issue in web were the commission was not being calculated at all.
• Commission Calculations: Fixed an issue where commissions were not being calculated at the box office under if the flag was not enabled for the box office. Now the sales promotion no longer shows up at the other outlet
• Donations: The program year is no longer restricted to +/- one year of the donation. The edit check is now one year before the date of the donation to 10 years after.
• Ticket Sales: The promotions are now read prior to each and every sale instead of being cached. IF something is disabled, the next sale can't use that promotion (both box office and internet)
• Promotions: There is now a flag on the sales promotions to completely inactivate it. If inactive, it is not visible in the report as selection criteria and is not visible in the event setup to be chosen for enable/disable. It just isn't there.
• Promotions: If the enable promotion at other outlet is turned on, then a commission structure must be supplied
• Events: Changed the setup of promotions so that those that are disabled in the promotion screen will not show up in the event screen.
• Sales Process: Corrected the security value that is verified in order to allow deletion of a fee in the sales window. It now checks the security in the 'data' tab of the employee window for 'Fees' as below.
  
  
• Sales Process: Changed the meaning of the 5 fee functions as per below. The version 6 settings were incongruous with new design in version 7 so these were re purposed. You can now decide is the person can change the value in the fee window when the fee is marked for one of the 4 options on the fee setup. Further, if able to change the fee, you can make it so that the user cannot enter a negative fee into the field. Negative fees could be used to give overall discounts on an order.
  
  
• Sales Process: Searching for a patron to transfer an order has been fixed for the specific condition of when a patron did not have an address. Now any patron can be found in the search window (even those with no address information)
• Pass Redemption: If the pass type is a gift certificate ($ value), then the redemption amount suggested in the pass window now includes any fees, donations or other items in the patrons cart so that the order will be fully paid off by the gift certificate. Originally (and in version 6), all passes just looked at the ticket amount.
• Form Letters: Fixed the Tool tips displayed when hovering over field names to display the proper replacement values per your venue setup. Example, a converted letter might say &patron in the tool tip. This will now be converted to 'Customer' or whatever your venue set up in default data for the word patron. This problem only occurred on letters converted from version 6.
• Form Letters: The batch date/time were not being filled for a letter that was just created and appeared empty on new letters. This has now been fixed to be the same as the print date/time. After the first printing of a letter, the batch date/time will remain constant as the date/time that the letter was merged into the patrons letter history. The print date/time will always be the current date and time.
• Web Sales: The percent sold calculation has been changed to reflect a percentage sold based on the 'total to report' field for the performance. This allows you to have standing room only seats on your venue and not include those in the total on the web.
• Reports: the deposit detail window no longer prints the full card value for those with permission to see the entire credit card. PCI compliance says it is ok to see cards if you have permission. We have adopted a more rigorous interpretation of this requirement to hide the card number and now do it for all deposit reports.
• Reports: till balance detail report no longer shows the full credit card information, even if employee is allowed to see it. (Similar to above - to take a very strict interpretation of PCI standards).
• Events and Dates: the on sales flags for a performance are now subjected to more rigorous comparisons. If you elect to update any one of the flags (onsale box office, internet, subscription, other outlet), then all are automatically checked to ensure promotions are set up for them. This is to help diagnose if a promotion will work at the various sales avenues.
• Passes/Gift Certificates: any pass of type 'Free Admission', 'Dollar Value', or '$ Avg/Admission' can no longer be marked as renewable. This is only applicable for true membership type passes. Each of the above can have the expiry date changed so that it can last longer, but it is not renewable so that a second pass is created and the old one 'retired'.

Subscriptions

The first step in setting up subscriptions is to make sure you have a control house. This is a fake show set up in 'Play & Dates' as normal. The following key steps must be done:

1. All prices are set to zero
2. Only the sales promotions for the subscription packages are enabled. Single ticket promotions are disabled
3. Those performances that you want to be part of the subscription package are set to that the flag 'Use in a Control House' is turned on. The column in the list called 'Subscription?' will have a YES in it. This means you only need to set up performances that are subscription performances an the others are not set up (or if they are set up, have the word 'NO' in the subscription? column)

This picture shows the subscriptions enables for only the season promotions for all the events

The second step is to set up a subscription package under 'Patron Sales->Season Reservations->Setup Season Package'. You will see a list window like below. Only last years subscription packages should be active and you have a couple of options:

Duplicate	duplicates an entire package. This is not normally done.
Initialize	Clears the printed date on a renewal notice, the renewal date and the order number assigned to a renewal. This is like starting over. Sometimes used in conjunction with renew.
Rollover	Just like verison6, this is the normal beginning of the process - although it does have some significant enhancements to simplify things, especially if you are going to fewer performances, or changing a venue. It takes last years subscription and prepares it for next year. The first step is to tell the system what the new control house will be. You will have created this in the first subscription step. The next step is to match the subscription houses from the current subscription to the next years control house. In this window, all the subscription performances are listed on the left. The next years subscription performances are on the right. If the name of the performance and the count are the same, this will automatically match them for you. However, the features of this window are such that you can: match two performance on the left side with one on the right. This is combining two subscription nights from the old package into one on the new package. Those in the 'priority 1' column get seated. Those in the 'priority 2' column get seated if the seat is available, and wait listed if it is not available If you don't match a performance, then no subscriptions will be moved for that. only 'Completed' subscriptions will be rolled over. Any with no status, printed status, or cancelled status will not be rolled over. as the system rolls over the seats, you will see the steps below.   and at the end, when you get back to the subscription window, the prior subscription will disappear (it will have been inactivated) and a new one created with the rolled over seats.

At the end of the rollover process (or if you are starting from scratch), you should double click on the new package to further prepare it for the next season. You will need to set up where it can be sold or renewed.

you will need to go to the plays tab to set up NEXT YEARS performances in the package. Note: Unlike version 6, do not put the control house into this list.

The last tab of interest is the list of patron in a subscription package.

You can manipulate patrons one at a time by double clicking on their package and setting the favorite seats and promotions. This is NOT the recommended way to do it as it is one patron at a time. But you can and you should be able to book ticket from here.

The next major component of managing favorite seats is to use 'Patron Sales->Season Reservations->Manage Favourite Seats'. You will see a window below that shows the complete status of the subscription package.

The key areas in this are:

1. The 'Package' drop down will show all your currently active subscription packages. Ideally, this should only be this years packages. use this to switch between packages.
2. The first list (on the left) contains the subscription evenings. Click on one of those to see the map for the evening, and to see the subscribers in the lower left corner.
3. The middle are shows the promotion and price codes. Use these later when setting seat prices.
4. The lower left contains the people in the package.
   • Click on one to see their seats
   • drag one into a different performance evening (first list from the top) to move them to a different night (its that simple)
5. The middle lower list has the current seats for the patron and the status
6. The lower right list has the 'problem' seats for all patrons in that package.... i.e. those that need to be seats still.

This window is really intended to act as the control for the package.

TO ADD A PATRON TO A PACKAGE

click new on the bottom left list, or drag a patron from any list of patrons (could be a mail list window for example) onto that lower area

When you click on the newly added patron, you will see that they have no seats and you will see that they are not a happy face. Instead, it shows a patron with a red circle. (no seats). Theatre Manager assumes 2 seats are what the patron prefers. If the subscriber wants more, then double click on the patron, change the number of seats to 3 or 4 and close the window.

To hold subscription seats for the patron:

1. Pick your promotion (middle popup)
2. Pick your price code
3. select the number of free seats from the map (here you can see I picked two in yellow that are at the upper right.)

This means I'm about to assign 2 seats in row '8' on the map to Doug Easterbrook for the promotion 'Adventure Season' using price code 'A'.

To complete the holding of the seats (not booking, but holding only), double click on the seats and they will go into the favourite seats for the patron. Now Doug has a happy face and his subscription is set up. It becomes easy to assign patrons and seats to the packages.

other options on this window are to:

• select seats and re price them
• hold seats for nobody in particular in the control house (just like holding on the ticket selling window) which will block them off from sale on the internet. use this feature if you already have your subscribers set up and want to bock out a range of good seats for the exchange process.
• hold seats for somebody in particular (just like the ticket selling window)
• manage seat priority

More on managing priority. Suppose somebody else wanted those seats. You can highlight the person, highlight the seats and double click on them, even if they are saved for somebody else. You will get a message asking if these seats are to be made 'Primary' (i.e. moved to this new patron and taken from the other patron), or 'Secondary' , which means that the person cannot have them yet but want to be put on a wait list for the seats.

if you pick secondary (the normal course of action), then you can see that the patron no longer has a happy face (too many subscription seats) and two of them are purple 3's. This means the patron is ranged 3 (scale of 1 to 5) in waiting for some seats. You can also see on the right list the start of our conflict seats.... ones that we need to fix before the season package is perfect and before we are ready to print renewal notices, or book the seats.

For any seat, we can right click on it (this means on the map, lower middle list, or lower right list) and do a couple of things with it. We can:

• Alter the waiting list priority (between 1 and 5)
• Make it the primary seat (the other person loses it)
• See who is waiting for that seat (including the person that has it)
• Set it as primary for next year, meaning that there is no hope the person gets it this year, but we know that the patron will not be renewing for some reason and so we indicate this person gets it next year as the primary seat. Note: we think this feature will be handy after subscriptions are over and in the middle of the season. IF somebody, say a new subscriber, indicates that they want some specific seats, you can queue them up as a wait list for next year and this knowledge is kept through the next year rollover as seats to fix (i.e. conflict seats as per above)

Booking subscription seats: This process becomes easier than in version 6 and fully integrated with the maps.

The first step is to find the patron when the renewal notice comes in. Then start up a new sale for the patron so that you see the sales window. Click on the 'Season' tab and you will see that the patrons packages are there. Then click on the 'Book' icon at the top of the window and all the tickets in the subscription package should be booked. Then all you need do is pay for it.

Printing Renewal notices: To print renewal notices, use the 'Patron Sales->Season Reservations->Print Renewal Notices' option. You will see a window that is similar to version 6.

Highlight the options you want, click the next button through the process and enter any additional criteria that you want... then when you get to the last tab to print the notices, you may see a list of errors as below. These are subscriptions that had problems so that you can review and fix them, prior to reprinting. Patrons with a red 'X' had issues. Those with a green checkbox are ok.

Then click the 'Proceed' button to see the renewal notices that you selected to print in the normal report print window. You can send them to PDF or print a page, or print them all, as you wish. It may be useful saving a PDF of each batch so you can easily reprint later on or see what went out.