Reserving tickets for VIPs / staff members - Admin Sales
You may wish to reserve and send tickets to your VIP guests, sponsors or perhaps your staff members. All of this can be done with our Admin sales feature. In this article we will explain how you can use Admin sales to send tickets or reservations directly to your guests. Jump ahead to check out:
- What are admin sales?
- Where do I find admin sales?
- How do I create an admin sale?
- Settlement types
- Creating and managing reservations
- Personalisation and distribution of tickets/reservations
- Admin sales list
What are admin sales?
Admin sales is the function within the TicketCo platform which you can use to create and distribute tickets for your guests and maybe even yourselves. You can think of this as "back of house" sales. This is especially useful when it comes to free tickets for sponsors, for example.
In the case of sponsor tickets, it is common to create free tickets in the TicketCo system by only enabling the "Admin page" under Sales Channels on a specific ticket type on an event, so that you can distribute them later from the Admin sales feature.
In addition, you can also use Admin sales to reserve tickets for your customers, so that they have a particular allocation which they can redeem later on.
Where do I find admin sales?
Navigate to an event you wish to create an admin sale on, and then click Admin sales in the menu.
How do I create an admin sale?
To start making a sale, select the Create admin sale button which you see above.
Next, you will choose which ticket type or types you wish to include in your admin sale. The easiest way to do this is by changing the number of tickets you wish to add, and then clicking on the arrow like the picture below shows. Click Save to continue.
Settlement types
You will now get the option to choose which settlement type will be used.
Leave as reservation
Selecting this option will allow you to allocate the tickets/items within a reservation which you can choose to send to the customer, or leave until later. If you choose to send the reservation to the customer, they will get a link via email which they can use in order to complete the purchase - if the tickets are not free, they will simply pay for them via our regular checkout. The customer can also go to the TicketCo website to confirm the reservation via the Redeem reservation button:
When setting up a reservation, you can choose to assign a name and colour to the reservation. You might want to colour-code your reservations if they are for certain customers or sponsors, as this can help you to organise your admin sales page.
Under Expiry you can select whether the reservation should have no expiry, whether it should expire after a certain number of days, or whether it should expire after a specific date. Selecting From now in the drop down menu will allow you to define how many days or hours until the reservation expires, and selecting Exact date will allow you to define exactly when the reservation will expire.
Invoice
By choosing Invoice, the system will not request payment for the ticket(s), but will give you the option to either deliver the ticket straight away to the customer once you have completed the sale, or to send it manually to the customer at a later stage.
TicketCo does not generate any invoices and therefore the responsibility lies with you as an organiser to invoice the customer and settle the payment. This will be reported as an invoice sale, meaning that you have received the money directly and not via TicketCo. With Invoice selected, our provision is reduced to 1.2% rather than the current price plan.
Cash
By choosing Cash, the customer will also receive the ticket straight away after you have completed the sale, and the TicketCo system will recognise this as money you have already received. This will also be clarified on the invoice you receive once you get a payment from us.
Discounts
Under Discount Type you can select whether you wish to provide a discount as a certain percentage or as a particular value. The field to the right of this is where you input the value and can be applied to all types of settlement.
- If you select "Subract amount" and then enter 10 in the field to the right, this will mean that whenever the discount is applied, all tickets within the order will be discounted by 10 in the relevant currency e.g. if you are a UK organiser, they will be discounted by £10; if you are a Norwegian organiser, they will be discounted by 10NOK and so on.
- If you select "Set Percentage" and then enter 10 in the field to the right, this will mean that whenever the discount is applied, all tickets will be discounted by 10%
Personalisation
Once you have selected which settlement type you want to go with, you should personalise the tickets selected by adding the details of the customer(s) who will be using them. Please note that it is not mandatory to personalise the tickets, but it can be useful to do so in order to keep track of your admin sales.
Bear in mind that if you create an admin sale for multiple tickets (e.g. a bulk invoice sale), you can only distribute them to one email address and one phone number. This means that if you personalise the tickets, the recipient must then distribute the tickets amongst themselves.
Distribution
The last step is to distribute the tickets, and you do this by filling in the email address and phone number of the recipient and clicking Send receipt, as the picture below shows. This will generate a ticket in the system straight away and distribute it to the email address and phone number provided.
If you wish to find the tickets in the system afterwards and perhaps distribute them at a later time to the customer, you can select Skip sending (contact information will be saved) instead. This means the ticket or reservation would be generated in the system so that you can locate it, but it would not be sent to the customer until you prompt this at a later point.
Admin sales list
If you now click on Admin sales once again, you will see all your admin sales listed on the event you are in. It's worth noticing the different symbols on the left on each line indicate the settlement type you have for each admin sale.
Remember that when you select Cash and Invoice as settlement type, the tickets are generated straight away, meaning they will also be contained within your event report. If you select Reservation as settlement type, this does not generate tickets straight away, but keeps the tickets set aside for the customer who can then redeem them via our regular checkout if they have a link; or you may choose to go back to the reservation and select to redeem it as a cash or invoice sale later on.
The Status column to the right of the customer name indicates whether an email has been distributed successfully to the customer containing their cash or invoice sale. This will be marked with "OK" if the email was successful, and "-" if no email has been sent. Note, this status column only reports on the status of email deliveries (not SMS).
Splitting reservations
If you have assigned 10 tickets for a certain guest, and then they decide that they in fact do not require all 10 tickets, you can choose to split the reservation into smaller groups. Click on the arrow next to Edit, and then hit Split reservation.
You will be able to select which items in a reservation you want to assign to a new reservation, and then continue as normal. You can also choose to Delete reservations if needed.
Admin sales report
You can download a list of all of your active admin sales by clicking on the Settings symbol next to the search bar. The list will be downloaded as a CSV file which you can then import into Excel or other spreadsheet software.