What's new in Elevent

For those of you in jurisdictions where the sales tax specifies midpoint rounding, you can save yourself a few dollars in over-reported sales tax with this new rounding policy.

Before, fractions of a cent would round either up or down--up by default. With midpoint rounding, calculated sales tax will round a fractional cent up if it is >= .5 of a cent, and down if it < .5 of a cent.

To enable this rounding policy, visit Manage Taxes in the Tools menu.

Press the button to edit any existing sales taxes. Change the rounding rule to Midpoint.

Learn more about the exciting world of sales tax here.

To make the multi-scheduler more efficient, as you queue up showtimes to create, your most recently selected allocation template will now remain selected. This saves you some as you quickly schedule many showtimes at once.

Not using the Multi-Scheduler, Copy Showtime, or the Airtable import to streamline your process? Learn more about each in the knowledgebase.

Several versions of the WordPress plugin have been released--let's get caught up.

Restructured the CSS styling for cleaner customization

For a cleaner, easier time designing every aspect of the plugin to look sharp and consistent, we took a major pass through the entire plugin to make CSS styling optimal.

We did extensive testing to minimize any unexpected changes that might occur from any customization you have already done, but backup before updating and do a review just in case.

Also new & improved:

• Revised it so user-friendly text (instead of the slugs) displays in the filter dropdown in calendar views
• Added the ability to specify in-person, live-stream, and/or virtual showtime types in the elevent_calendar_view shortcode. This introduces the ability to display virtual, on-demand streaming windows as date ranges in the event calendar views.
• New taxonomies will now have a default color. So color-coding on the event calendar will not require additional color picking unless you want to change colors
• Added some default styling to enforce a min-width on the ticket quantity selector. This was done to protect ticket widgets from not showing the numeral on smaller mobile devices on some websites
• Changed the default color of navbar widgets to show on light backgrounds--the more common default
• Fixed a bug causing event search results not to display due to exceptional leading "A" and "The" sorting

Order Fields--those random checkboxes, dropdowns, and text fields you can add alongside items and transactions to collect extra bits of information. It's been fascinating to see the wide range of use.

We realized you couldn't easily group a set of responses into a date range--making it difficult to parse out responses from one season to the next.

So we've added a purchase date column to the Customer Order Field Report to help you do just that.

Learn more about collecting extra info with Order Fields here.

Credentials--printed badges or labels--can have a printed photo to help personalize and identify patrons on sight.

At any time, a person with one or more credentials can upload or, if on a mobile device, take a photo, crop it, and resize it in the Elevent account. Or if acquiring the credential on goelevent.com, add a photo if interrupted during the purchase of an item with a credential.

None of this is new.

Now, for the first time, you can prompt users during a sale of a pass or ticket package to enter their credential information before checkout--and also ask for a photo for each credential. All while embedded on your website.

This is an especially valuable feature when making free or low-cost passes or ticket badges available from your own website--reducing the number of customer follow-ups you need to undertake.

Learn more about collecting customer info on credentials here.

Before, we weren't doing a great job isolating transactions partially or fully paid for using Elevent gift card Extras. They were showing up as Payment "none".

You can now see explicitly broken-out dollar amounts for Elevent gift card usage in transaction-level reporting.

See, there it is. A column titled "Gift Card".

You'll find it in these reports:

• Stripe Reconciliation
• Transaction Reconciliation
• Staff Shift

You will also see Gift Card usage broken out in Order History

Gift Card are a type of Extra in Elevent. Learn more about managing gift cards here.

In keeping with the late 2022/early 2023 season of total rewrites, enter Credentials.

We have ambitious plans for credentials and all the various ways there are to provide attendees with a something that gets them into one or many doors.

Before building more on top, we gave credentials a total once-over to make them easier to set up, a bit more flexibility, and a real performance boost.

They've moved

Credentials used to live on their own in the main menu of the Back Office. No longer!

You'll find credential setup now in the submenu of any pass, ticket package, or membership.

We eliminated the ability to have a single credential work with multiple passes, ticket packages, or memberships. Because nobody really seemed to care about that. So they are one-to-one now, which is more intuitive anyway.

They're more Open-ended

You used to choose from a small list of pre-defined fields. Now, credentials contain an optional selection of:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Photo
• Custom Data 1
• Custom Data 2

You can use those custom data fields to collect any bit of info--name of an organization, a creative work, title, favorite color, what have you.

Requiring Credential Info Now Works in Widgets

This is a big one. It is now possible to interrupt a purchase and require entry of credential information within the embedded widgets on your own website.

They're more flexible

You can choose which custom fields will actually print--or are just there to collect bits of info. Anything that isn't printed is considered optional.

Also, all users can now save just some of the information on a credential and enter the rest later.

Custom credential layouts were a very tedious affair before--it's now easier for us to create custom badge layouts and we have more options planned for the future.

Tools & Printing

The pre-existing Credential Import and Credential Management & Printing tools work now with the new credentials. So you can still import and assign credentials from Airtable even if you don't have emails for all recipients.

Heads up!

Since the switchover, you will find that previously printed credentials will show up as unprinted. This can make tracking credentials a little tricky, but we made this switch when the least # of credentials were hanging around.

Impact on older credentials

Since this is a ground-up renovation of credentials, older credentials

Get (re)started on credentials here.

Nerd alert: this gets complicated

We have made some significant changes to the way ticket exchanges process, paving the way for us to improve the way revenue on exchanges reports out.

Under the surface, we reinvented what ticket exchanges really do. From 2022 and earlier, we recorded ticket exchanges as a 100% discount on the original ticket, which was then canceled, and then a comp of the new ticket. Now ticket exchanges will show as a refund of the original ticket for $0 dollars and comp of the new ticket.

If you put one concept in your head, let it be this:

• When you run reports broken down by event or showtime, tickets and revenue show on the tickets after the exchange
• When you run reports that show tickets and revenue for your whole organization, tickets and revenue show at the time of the original sale

What you'll see:

Performing Exchanges in the Box Office

No changes

Individual Order History

No changes. You'll still see exchanged tickets as cancelled in the Box Office

And you'll see exchange detail in Back Office Order History

Reporting Date Reports (Aka Distributor Reports)

Event and Showtime reports like these are where you'll notice the real change.

In the event of a ticket exchange, the revenue collected on the original ticket will report on the events and showtimes the customer received after the exchange--not during the original purchase.

This is what we want, right? To show amounts collected in exchange for actual admissions to a certain show, even if the actual amounts were collected at a different time from a different order.

This can cause confusion--on certain reports, we will report the revenue for different events at a different time than it was originally collected. So take note.

Regular Revenue Reports

For any revenue reports that aren't broken down by event or showtime, revenue will report when it was collected--the original sale.

For the Event and Showtime Sales Reports, you will see revenue reported on the events/showtimes on tickets after the exchange was performed--similar to the Reporting Date reports. Since these reports filter by purchase date, note that the revenue will be filtered in/out by the date of the exchange, not the original sale.

Accounting & Reconciliation Reports

Revenue will report as collected during the original sale. During the exchange, a refund and sale will report in the transaction history, but all amounts will be for $0. So you will see a refund and a sale for $0 with a payment type of "None".

You'll see the same in the Transaction Exports.

Because this was such a significant re-envisioning, the change will only affect ticket exchanges going forward; they will not report in this newer way retroactively in 2022 and earlier.

We have 3 pricing plans: Basic, Premiere, and Enterprise. To help make it clear which pricing plan your Elevent account is currently subscribed to, we added a little label on your Account Settings page to indicate.

WordPress Plugin v0.5.4 is out.

There's a new view in town--the simple yet effective List of Shows now displays alongside all of the calendar views.

Grouped by day, the List of Shows displays each showtime in chronological order in the simplest, easiest-to-digest way we could imagine. It can also be filtered by a category of your choice. You don't need to do anything but update to make this option available.

Also new:

• Added an option to the [elevent-calendar-view] shortcode to pre-filter event calendars to include only events in a specific festival/season/series taxonomy
• Added a new setting in Elevent settings to define a Default Timezone independent of the WordPress timezone. The Default Timezone will apply to Elevent Events automatically but can be overridden on specific events.
• Added support to specify a landing view on the new event calendar views to first land the user on month, week, day schedule, or showtime list view. Appending a querystring parameter to the ./calendar-view/ link accomplishes this--e.g., https://yoursite.com/calendar-view/?view=list
• Improved the sorting by title to exclude sorting event titles by a leading "A" or "The"
• Returning shortcodes as strings, not echoed, as a best practice
• Removed the chattiness in console.logs and console.debugs
• Removed some calls to demo functions to clean things up a bit