Box Office Software For Small Venue Operators

Keeping track of ticket sales, maintaining details of customers in a database plus printing and mailing tickets requires a significant amount of work for venue operators and can be especially onerous if the venue relies on a just a handful of dedicated volunteers. So it?s not surprising that many organizations choose to outsource this task to specialist ticketing service companies. But for many organizations, and especially for smaller venues, outsourcing is not always an ideal option as it has its downside points:

* the cost of the service may be relatively high in relation to the ticket price
* no opportunity may be given to vary transaction fees charged on online ticket purchases
* access to the customer database may be limited or non existent
* ticket revenue may be retained until the event has taken place
* events will be promoted on the ticketing service company?s web site together with events from other venues

These days however an increasing number of box office software systems can be accessed that even the smallest venues such as schools, community organisations and non-profit organizations can use to manage both their box office ticketing and web ticket sales. And not only is the cost of employing such systems extremely affordable, but generally speaking, such box office software systems are not complicated to set up, offer a logical and easy to use interface and normally don?t require the purchase of additional hardware or software.

The most common method that companies offering box office software charge for the service is a fee per ticket pricing model. With this pricing model, there is no software to purchase and generally no setup charges or other ongoing fees apart from a usage fee which will generally be based on the value of all tickets sold through the system. This may either be a percentage of the ticket price or a fixed dollar rate per ticket, or a combination of both. And such charges may be low as 2% of the ticket price or $.50 per ticket, depending on the software provider and the volume of tickets that are sold through the system

Indeed it is generally the case that possibly the only important considerations for small organisations is that they operate a web site,(to sell tickets online), have some means of accepting payment from online ticket sales into their bank account, and have a suitable ticket printer.

Even setting up online ticketing is generally quite straightforward. Typically the ticketing software company will create a webpage that looks exactly like the venue?s web site where the ticket selection and payment process is carried out. The actual ticketing software and the payment processing is hosted by the ticketing software company so a hyperlink is simply added to a button which says e.g. Buy Tickets Online to bring the ticket purchaser to the ticketing page.

For handling payments, two alternatives are generally offered. Firstly, the ticketing company may process all payments and receives all ticket sales revenue into their bank account. After the event has been held, the ticketing software company will forward the total ticket revenue less credit card processing fees and any system usage fees to the venue operator. With the second alternative, the venue operator sets up their own payment gateway and merchant account, and all ticket sales revenue is then received by the venue operator immediately a ticket is sold. The ticketing software company then invoices the usage fees based on the value of tickets sold.

For printing tickets, the preferable option is to use a specialised thermal ticket printer. Unfortunately however such printers can be quite expensive. Fortunately many ticketing software companies offer the ability to print tickets with a standard laser or inkjet printer, where tickets are printed on a normal letter or A4 sized piece of paper. Pre-perforated paper which divides the page into 4 or 5 tickets can be purchased from specialized paper suppliers or perforated to order from a print shop to allow the printing of multiple tickets per sheet which can be easily separated

Of course any new system can take some time to learn, but in the longer term, most smaller venue operators will be grateful for the savings in both time and trouble that a fully featured box office ticketing system can offer.