What's new in Elevent

We're introducing 2 new features and some smaller improvements:

Special Attributes

You can now select special attributes on your showtimes to identify any specific shows that have aspects of interest to the buyer--these may be accessibility, like ASL interpretation, bonus content like a Q&A or talkback, or technical details like 3D or IMAX projection.

When populated, an (i) icon will show next to the ticket button, that, when clicked, will show a modal indicating what special attributes are on the event.

Time Slot Listing Option

For clients who have regularly occurring events occurring in time slots (eg. museum or gallery entry), you now have the option to change how the date-picker will appear on the event page. Instead of showing all dates and times as default (which is visually messy), it will default to the first available date, show a full week in the top bar, and the 'view more' option is now scrollable, so you won't get long dropdown making your UI difficult to use.

To use this option, you can:

• Use the shortcode type attribute 'time-slot': [elevent_showtime_list type="time-slot"]
• In the 'Configured by WordPress' section of your event, check the 'Time Slot Event' box.

• You can comment out the default elevent_showtime_list and uncomment the time-slot version in the single-page.php template.

Other minor fixes:

• On event pages, if there's only one venue or one date, the filter will not be rendered.
• In the Calendar, if you have an event with a 0 mins runtime, the runtime will not be rendered.
• In the Calendar, the display name will be the event name. Before, the showtime name was being truncated based on when the '-' character was appearing, but this was breaking the display for events with dashes in their name.

They're not staff. They're not customers. But they may be:

• Producers
• Touring Companies
• Booking Agents
• Venue Renters
• Promoters
• Artists
• Sales Outlets
• Marketing Agencies

Or just about anyone else with a vested interest in specific events. You can't give them Elevent logins, but you don't want to burden your staff with daily or weekly reports to keep them abreast of sales.

The new Producers system in Elevent to the rescue. Next to where you manage your staff (In the Account menu), you'll see a whole new type of person--Producers.

From here, you can add and manage a library of external users who request/require regular updates on sales of their events. Add them and then subscribe them to daily, weekly, or monthly updates to specific showtime sales.

Not only does this save you a boatload of manual effort, but it adds a layer of trust to the sales numbers you share--no manual intervention = no funny business.

Learn all about the Producer system here.

The Staff Shift report has some expanded detail to help audit staff practices, identify who might need a little retraining, and alert you if someone might be up to something untoward.

On the Totals row, you'll quickly see each staff member's:

• Comps
• Discounts Applied
• Price Overrides
• No Sales

These are the major ways one of your frontline or call center staff might be selling off your inventory at less than intended and cutting into your revenue.

The Staff Shift report is one of the most useful reports in Elevent. Take a deep dive into this popular report here.

You can now quickly see the total amount of all service charges and sales tax collected over a period of time. Just glance at the Totals bar in the venerable Total Sales Report and you'll see a couple new values.

Take a deep dive into the first report most Back Office users see.

If you are larger shows using reserved seating, preparing and managing the day of the event can be a challenge--especially if you have VIPs and special needs to attend to as guests arrive.

The Showtime Seat Manifest is here to make this a more manageable process.

To get there, go to the showtime details for any reserved seating showtime. Then press Seat Manifest in the submenu.

From here you can click around, see exactly who is seated in each seat, what they bought, when, and in which order. You can press the bust icon by the customer or the order number to pop over to that customer or order.

Lower on the page, you'll see a Seat Manifest showing everyone who gets in and their seat assignment. You can press the button to export it and print it out.

Bean counters rejoice! Here's a package of new data and tools to help you categorize and track sales by each GL Code--as it corresponds to your own chart of accounts.

New Management Tool: the GL Code Manager

Check it out here, under the Tools menu.

While you can configure each item you sell or collect with a GL Code, as your inventory grows, managing it all to make sure the right GL codes are associated with each item can be complicated.

This tool gives you better oversight and makes it easy to confirm you have your accounting codes set up correctly.

Just filter down to items with GL Codes that aren't yet set, check off some to update, and bulk-apply the right GL Code.

GL Export can now export all GL Code accounts at once

Gone are the days of exporting each GL Code on its own. When you go to the GL Code Export, you can filter to All GL Codes and export each in one spreadsheet.

Added a GL Code column to all Transaction Exports

For the most granular detail about each item sold, you may turn to the Transaction Exports. Should you find it useful, we've added the GL Code column to these exports as well.

There's a new report in the Reporting app. It's the pinnacle of excitement--the Tax Detail report. Do we know how to party or what?

If you live in a fun place where you have multiple, distinct sales taxes to apply to the sale of items, this report will break down how much to pay to each tax authority.

What's particularly notable here is how much easier it is now to break down sales tax where you have multiple sales taxes in play.

To learn more, check out the Sales Tax Reporting deep dive.

Listing out some of the smaller improvements and mini-features you may have recently noticed:

• After doing an A/B test of different Box Office user experiences when selling Reserved Seats, we declared a winner. The flow where agents first choose seats and then assign tickets on a full screen has replaced the original design, where tickets were assigned below the seat map (Yes, I know we haven't fully announced the new Reserved Seating system--we're getting that long overdue announcement out shortly).

• Squished a little bug where tickets were sorting in the wrong order in Box Office - full-screen mode
• When setting up custom Order Fields, products you've already associated with the order field will no longer clutter up the dropdown selections
• Added a full-screen Reserved Seating view to embedded website ticketing widgets
• UI Tweak in the Box Office to better align showtime buttons on smaller screens

We've taken our original, abbreviated version of merchandise and totally reinvented it.

With this reimagining of merchandise, you'll find a more robust set of categorization and grouping options, a faster, sleeker storefront sales experience, and expanded inventory control. This rebuild of our merchandise system elevates merchandise into a full, retail-lite product sufficient for a gift shop, floating storefront, or gear table.

Note these 2 things:

• Merchandise is only available if you have opted-into the Concessions & Merch add-on (optional)
• This release, while large, is phase 1 of a 2-phased approach to reinventing merch in Elevent. Phase 2 will involve a full, online webstore for merch using the same Elevent shopping cart.

New Merchandise Structure, Grouping, and Management Tools

Group merch into Types, Groups, Merchandise itself, and one or more variants. You can also use brand and GL Code groupings on merch--down to each variant.

With the new Merchandise Manager, you'll have oversight and the ability to make bulk changes to your merch.

Airtable Importing and Updating

Use a new Airtable template to do a one-time or periodic import of all of your merch data--from a single button click.

It's a powerful solution to add-on custom processes, reports, dashboards, and automation to track yields, unit costs, shipments, and orders.

Unique SKUs and Inventory Control

Down to each variant of any merch item, custom price, discount, manage declining inventory, and identify by the product SKU.

Quick and Easy Selling From the Box Office

Merch can still be sold from the same point-of-sale as tickets and memberships, but now it's faster and easier. Expanded buttons allow for quick and easy add-to-carts.

Or for larger stores, simply scan the QR code or barcode on each item and operate grocery store style.

This revamped merch works with a lot of the Elevent systems you use today, including:

• Price Overrides
• Saved Orders
• Sales channels
• Refunds
• GL codes
• Brands
• Discounts/member discounts
• The archiving process
• Taxes
• Service charges
• Reports
• Salesforce app
• Elevent API
• Email confirmations, Receipt printing…everything associated with the shopping cart
• Guest checkout
• Gift Cards

There's more to come next year, but this is quite a lot to dig into. Learn more here:

• Selling Merch
• Intro to Merch
• Categorizing Merch
• Importing Merch from Airtable

• We’re making it easier to stage events and showtimes in WordPress before publicly publishing them.
  • Any showtimes that have anything other than Web and Box Office or Private (those that don't show up on goelevent.com) will now set as WordPress status: pending. These showtimes will not be displayed on the calendar/grid/event pages.
  • Elevent Events have a new event status: pending. Any event without any published showtimes will be event status: pending and can be hidden from event grids, lists, carousels, or calendars—similar to how past events work.

• This fixes a bug that was allowing 'Box Office only’ showtimes to be automatically synced and displayed online.
• This fix will also remove any reference to the venue / date of the hidden showtime unless there are other events taking place at the same location.

If your filters are no longer populated after this change, head to Settings > FacetWP and click 'reindex' on your Facets.