Ticketing

What this is for

Grandma wants two gala seats held at will-call. A studio buys a block
of Saturday passes for its families. Your web vendor sells a hundred
weekend passes before doors ever open. Presales are real seats and
real money, and until now the list lived in whoever’s inbox took the
order.

The Ticketing area is the presale side of the gate. Ticket types
put a name, a price, and a capacity on each event’s seats. The
register records online and direct sales against them — with
seats-left math that refuses to pretend — and each sale can bill
through a one-click draft invoice in Receivables. And for producers
selling through an outside vendor, the Tickets link on your tour
dates puts a Buy tickets button on the event’s public page.

The one thing to understand first

Gate money and presale money take different roads, on purpose.

On-site money — the cash box at the door, the card reader at the
table — is counted where it’s actually collected: the event’s
Settlement sheet, in the cash boxes and card batches. See
Show-day settlement. If this
register also took on-site sales, the same dollars would be counted
twice — once from the card batch, once from the sale.

So the register records online and direct presales only. The
On-site channel is in the sale dialog’s list but deliberately
greyed out, with the reason written underneath: gate sales are counted
on the event’s Settlement sheet — money only from boxes and batches.
Both roads end at your ticket sales account; they just start from
different places, and nothing can double-bill.

Ticket types

A ticket type is one priced admission for one event — Weekend Pass,
Saturday Gala — and every sale records against one.

The types table shows each type’s price, its Sold count against
its capacity, and whether it’s On sale. Editing a type’s price or
capacity applies to future sales — recorded rows keep the amount they
were sold at.

A type with no sales can be deleted. Once anything has sold — even a
sale you later voided — the type is the register’s price list and
history, so the way to retire it is the On sale switch: off-sale
types stop appearing in the sale dialog but keep their rows.

Recording a presale

If the event is in a state where you collect
sales tax, the dialog says what’s added
before you save: + $3.63 sales tax on top (CA 7.25%) — $53.63 to
collect. The sale records the tax, and the invoice it raises carries
the same figure onto its line — the tax reaches your books when that
invoice is sent.

Three tiles keep score for whatever event you’ve filtered to:
Presale revenue, Tickets sold against total capacity, and
Not yet invoiced, which turns amber when recorded sales exist that
Receivables has never heard of.

Capacity that refuses to lie

Try to sell more than a type has left and the register stops you
before anything is written, with the numbers in the sentence: Only 12
of 200 Weekend Pass left. A sold-out type says so.

And if a type somehow ends up past its cap — two people recording in
the same instant, or a cap you lowered after selling — the register
doesn’t hide it. The Sold column shows the overage in red, 204 / 200
(4 over), and the tiles flag how many types have sold past capacity.
An oversold show is a problem you want named, not smoothed over.

Fixing a wrong sale

A recorded sale can’t be edited — it gets voided and re-entered,
which is what keeps the seat math honest. Void sale… on the row
menu puts the seats back on sale and leaves the row struck through as
a record. If the sale had an invoice, the confirmation says so: the
invoice lives on in Receivables, and you void it there if it shouldn’t
bill.

The invoice, in one click

A recorded sale with real dollars on it can raise its invoice without
retyping anything.

Back on the register, the sale’s row links the invoice number and
annotates its status — a still-unsent draft, paid, void — so a dead or
unsent invoice can’t hide behind its number. One sale, one invoice; a
doubled click is refused and names the spare draft to delete.

Selling through an outside vendor

Plenty of producers sell spectator tickets through Eventbrite,
ShowClix, or a similar vendor — and that’s fine; the vendors just take
their cut. If that’s you, the piece you want is on the Tour Website
module: open Tour dates, edit the event’s listing, and fill in the
Tickets link field. The event’s public tour page grows a
Spectator tickets card with a Buy tickets button pointing at
your vendor’s checkout.

The link and the register are independent — use either, or both: the
button for the public, the register for the direct sales and comps you
handle yourself.

Honest limits

• No online checkout of our own yet. The Buy-tickets button links
  out to your vendor, and the register records sales you took
  yourself. Nothing a vendor sells flows onto the register by itself.
• State sales tax, not admissions taxes. Presales add state sales
  tax when the event’s state has an active rate — see
  Sales tax. The separate admissions or
  amusement taxes some states and cities levy aren’t modeled, so that
  math stays with your accountant.
• No door scanning. No barcodes, no check-in screen — the
  purchaser names on the register are your will-call list.
• A ticket covers the whole event. There’s no per-session ticket
  yet — a gala-only ticket is best handled as its own named type,
  Saturday Gala, on the same event.

Where to go next

• Show-day settlement — where gate
  money is counted
• Invoices — sending the draft, and recording
  the money when it arrives
• Money — how ticket revenue lands on an event’s
  P&L