What's new in Elevent

Small improvement to the Get Showtimes calls from the Elevent API (For instance https://api.goelevent.com/Showtime/All. Showtimes will now list in chronological order in the response.

Elevent for Salesforce v1.1 is available. This version includes:

 

Improvement

  

Automatic tracking of field history on Elevent custom objects

The app will now automatically set up field tracking on Elevent custom objects. This makes the sync more transparent. Elevent objects can be viewed on a record’s History-related list or through History reports. For each field, field tracking logs the date and time of change, the user making the change, the old and new values, and introduces the ability to undo a change.

You'll be able to review the update history in the Related tab on each Elevent Update

 

Improvement

  

Elevent for Salesforce will no longer require bleeding-edge versions of NPSP to install

The app will now install and upgrade with less-recent versions of the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) extensions. This became a burden as the NPSP install link has more recently trailed the latest release of NPSP by a number of weeks, causing confusion.

Current NPSP version dependency is NPSP v3.223

 

Fix

  

Adjusted the automatic setting of Last Imported data on On-Demand Imports to reach back 1 day further

Frequent users of On Demand importing data could get confused if no data was being imported when there had been some recent updates. Manually setting Last Imported Data wasn't so intuitive, so this fix will agree better with the API and get all data.

Note, this might result in more duplicate entries of the in-process records in Elevent Customer Updates, but do not be alarmed--the actual, useable processed accounts, contacts, and opportunities will not be duplicated.

 

Fix

  

Avoiding conflict during concurrent scheduled and on-demand processing

It's possible to get this error message: unable to obtain exclusive access to this record” error.This is a Salesforce conflict that could get caused when a scheduled process and an on-demand process try to run at the same time. This fix avoids the conflict, which is really a false alarm.

With extended data about events comes a need to import more of that data easily--enter our Airtable integration.

If you've imported events or showtimes from Airtable in the past, be sure to check in the support team on chat to get the new Airtable template--it contains some handy improvements and can import just about any bit of information that Elevent can hold about events and showtimes.

This really comes in handy if you are using the Elevent for WordPress plugin or are integrated to the Elevent Extended Web API.

Also helpful--now you can categorize event types on whatever you call them, not their out-of-the-box names.

In addition to importing In-person, live streams, and virtual/on-demand showtimes, the new template also includes a Sub-events tab, useful for importing parts of events, like shorts, performers, sessions, works, or acts that comprised a multi-part event.

Learn more about Importing Events and Importing Showtimes from Airtable.

With the introduction of the new Box Office and Concessions, we decided to exclude the current iteration of our lightly used merchandise product line. It was, and still is, our intention to reinvent merch in the future to make it web-vendable, support fulfillment, and more robust inventory controls.

From your feedback, we re-implemented the existing merchandise products in the new Box Office so no one would lose any pre-existing functionality.

This means, if Merch is enabled on your Elevent account, you will once again see Merch in the main menu.

And if you have any merch items for sale, you'll see them under a Merch tab in the Box Office.

Merch supports the new, more sophisticated multiple sales tax rates, and they can be targeted by discounts and member-restricted discounts as well.

Members who have an active membership that expires on a specific date will now still be able to use their member benefits on and through the expiration date of their membership; memberships no longer expire on the actual expiration date.

Before, when an agent pulled up a showtime in the Box Office, all of the public tickets available would show--including member-exclusive tickets. That could result in a cluttered or confusingly long list for those with a variety of member-exclusive tickets.

Now, when an agent pulls up a showtime, if no customer has been brought up, none of the members-only tickets will be visible. If the agent does bring up a customer who is an active member, the members-only tickets they may buy or receive will display.

Members-only tickets is a powerful feature. Learn all about it here.

Before, you could create one or more sales tax rates and determine whether each item you sell was taxable or not. Each item can have the tax calculated and paid over-and-above by the buyer or computed and reported out of the price of the item. You can even determine whether service charges paid by the customer were also subject to sales tax.

We've taken sales tax a lot further, adding the ability to assign multiple, distinct sales taxes to any one item. This is often a requirement if you have an item subject to two or more tax jurisdictions, such as a beverage/alcohol tax or VAT.

The screen when creating a sales tax has changed--you can now set defaults across product types when creating a sales tax and set more granular tax settings on individual items later on.

When setting any item, like a ticket or concession, as taxable, you can now choose exactly which sales tax(es) will be applied.

Learn more here

Note: The ability to partial refund a sales tax on an individual item when using multiple tax rates is not supported in the Box Office. This is such a bizarre set of circumstances we are not likely to support it in the future.

In the new Box office, if you are set up to use a thermal roll-paper receipt printer (e.g. Star Micronics), and you have chosen it as your receipt printer of choice, receipts will now auto-print after completion of a box office order.

Previously, the agent would have to press a print button to print the receipt.

Previously, if you took a Membership off-sale entirely for all users, any current members who still had some time left on the membership wouldn't still be able to receive the benefits of what was left of their non-renewable membership.

We made a change that will allow the remaining members, for the term of their existing membership, to still receive their benefits, whether it's exclusive member items, member-exclusive discounts, or members-only access.

For Developers Only

To help system integrators assess whether to update the data in their own systems, we've added a LastModified date and timestamp to our API calls.

For instance, in the Customer/All endpoint, the API will return customers who had any kind of activity over the time period requested. That might include a purchase, refund, or update of their customer info. Along with their current set of info and items, the API will provide the LastModified timestamp:

If the timestamp isn't more recent than the last update in whatever external data the integrator is using, this update can be ignored.

Learn more about the Elevent API here