Allocating Seats Between Box Office and Webstore, and Selling from the Box Office
This documentation is for Reserved Seating (and Reserved/GA hybrid) only. Click on this link to see the documentation for General Admission (GA) Seating. This page contains full documentation for the Manage seats page; for a quick tutorial, see steps 2 and 3 of the Test Drive checklist.
To use the Seat Manager, click on the Manage seats link in the Management panel of the dashboard.
The Manage seats page lets you determine which seats the webstore may sell, and also lets you make and accept payment for reservations yourself in the box office. If the payment is cash or check, we do NOT charge our normal per-ticket fee, and of course the bank’s credit card processing fees do not apply. If you accept a credit card for payment, however, the fees are the same as if the tickets were purchased online.
Selecting Seats
Everything in the seat manager works by first selecting seats and then applying an action to the selected seats. There are 3 ways to select seats:
- To select a single seat, click on it, and a black border will appear. You can add additional seats to the selection by clicking on them. To clear the selection on a single seat, click again.
- You can select rectangles of seats by clicking on one corner, and then holding down the shift key and clicking on the opposite corner. A common use of this selection mode is to select an entire row.
- You can select all the seats with a specific status in a particular section by clicking in the associated rectangle in the summary area below the seat chart. This makes it possible to allocate all the premium seats to the box office while leaving the regular seats on sale online, assuming you have sections of that sort.
To help you know where you are, the number of selected seats is shown at the right.
Useful shortcut: Seat selection is sticky. That means that seats remain selected after an action is applied. For example, after you select all the box office seats for one performance and then allocate them to the box office, you can click in the next performance in the calendar. The same seats will still be selected, so you can allocate them to the box office with a single click.
See this note for an example of how to use sticky selection to copy an allocation of seats to the box office from one performance to another.
Warning: In most cases, if you select seats of different statuses, you can’t do anything. For example, if you select seats that are allocated for online sale along with seats that are held at the box office, there is no action that can be taken. And if you select seats in different sections, you can’t add them to the basket together. The way around that is to add the seats to the basket, one section at a time, and then check out when you have everything in the basket that you wanted.
Seat Status
There are 6 kinds of seats:
- Unavailable: seats you can’t sell, and the webstore is not selling (e.g., seat removed for this production).
- Sold online: seats the webstore has sold, whose status you can’t change.
- Available online: seats available to the webstore for sale online. You can release those back to the box office so that you can sell them.
- Available at box office: seats the box office controls. You can sell them or hold them for patrons, or you can allocate them back to the webstore for sale online.
- Held at box office: seats you’re holding for patrons. You can cancel the hold, if you see fit.
- Sold from box office: seats you’ve sold. You can cancel the reservation, if the payment was via cash or check. If you used our credit card service, the reservation can not be canceled.
Changing Seat Status
To change the allocation of seats from webstore to box office, or vice versa: Select the seats you want. Once some seats are selected, links representing possible changes appear on the right. Click on the one you want. (It will be either Allocate to box office or Allocate for sale online). A red Updating seat info message… will appear at the upper left, and then the seats will change color to reflect the change.
This note contains a shortcut for copying an allocation of seats to the box office from one performance to another.
To sell seats at the box office: Select the seats you want to change (they must be allocated to the box office, and all in the same section) and click on the Sell seats (add to basket) link that has appeared at right. Next, choose ticket types (if any) from the dropdowns in the basket, and then click on the Checkout button to check out, just as online purchasers do. The difference is that you can choose the mode of payment (cash, check, credit card), and for cash and check payments, the rest of the information is optional. We suggest including at least an email address so that the patron will automatically get a receipt.
To sell seats from multiple sections) (e.g, Accessible together with a regular seat for a companion: Add the seats from each section to the basket in turn. The basket will then have multiple entries, but you can check all of them out as a single order.
To hold seats at the box office, with or without a name (e.g., ‘Tom Smith’, ‘Hold for late seating’): Select the seats you want to change (they must be allocated to the box office) and click on the [/sc]Hold at box office[/sc] link that has appeared at right. If you want to associate a name with the hold, type it in the text field under the chart before you click the OKlink to the right of the text field.
To cancel a hold: Select any one of the seats in the hold. Then click on the Release held seats link that has appeared at right. There is no way to cancel just some of the seats in a hold, but the underlying seats will remain allocated to the box office, and no one will be able to buy them online unless you allocate them to the webstore.
To cancel a cash or check reservation made at the box office: Select any one of the seats in the reservation. Then click on the Cancel reservation link that has appeared at right. There is no way to cancel just some of the seats in a reservation.
To cancel a reservation paid for by credit card: See this note.
(Advanced) See this note for how to move a reservation to different seats, or to a different event.