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Enhanced Subscription Reporting (May 2015): https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/319675
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In this release, we're introducing “Enhanced Subscription Reporting.” This is a substantial upgrade to our subscription functionality, an “under-the-hood” change that fundamentally improves subscription transaction handling. The core of this change is to provide a way for you to more easily report on individual shows within a subscription package. This will make it easier to more accurately and more completely report on the distribution of your subscription revenue.
A note on timing: No matter when we released this upgrade, it was inevitably going to be “midseason” for one organization or another -- and in order for the upgrade to work cleanly, it can only "kick in" for a new season that goes on sale AFTER the upgrade takes place. That means that if you’re in the middle of a season now, you'll start experiencing *all* of these improvements when it's time to sell “next season” in PatronManager.
We ask that if your organization has subscriptions -- no matter where you are in your season -- you read this article all the way through, to understand the changes we're making and find out if you need to take any action right now.
What you'll see with Enhanced Subscription Reporting
When you're using Enhanced Subscription Reporting and selling subscriptions, here's what you'll see in PatronManager.
Daily Sales Report
The first place you'll likely notice changes is the Daily Sales Report. In this report, data will start populating in the Subscription Distribution columns. This data tells you, as soon as a subscription is purchased, how much of that value is distributed to the fulfillment events in that package.
Performance Report/Event Summary Report
In these reports, you'll be able to see total of both "fulfilled" and "unfulfilled" subscriptions. You've always been able to see subscription totals on this report -- now you can see them even before you assign seats to your patrons.
In addition, date range filters will be available on the Performance Report. You can see exactly how much money you earned for a particular show during a specific time period.
Subscription Breakout Report
Similar to the Performance and Event Summary Reports, the Subscription Breakout Report will include Unfulfilled Subscription Totals, the option to add date range filters, and accurate numbers, even when exchanges take place.
What if we’ve already started selling this year’s subscriptions?
Starting now, we will distinguish between two different types of events: those that are built for Enhanced Subscription Reporting, and those that pre-date it or are otherwise ineligible. If you’ve already processed payments on any subscriptions for this season, then Enhanced Subscription Reporting is not enabled for your current season.
If you're not sure where you stand, you can find out if this applies to your events by looking at the "Disable Enhanced Subscription Reporting" field on a Ticketable Event.
If Enhanced Subscription Reporting isn't enabled for this season, what will I see?
If this feature isn't active for this season's events, your reports for this season are going to be pretty much the same as they've always been in the past. You won't be able to report on subscription distribution in the Daily Sales Report or see the unfulfilled subscription totals in your Event reports. Date range filters on the Performance Report will also be hidden.
Daily Sales Report
Without Enhanced Subscription Reporting enabled for events, you'll still see the new version of the Daily Sales Report, but the Subscription Distribution amounts will be marked as "N/A".
Performance Report, Event Summary Report, and Subscription Breakout Report
Date range filters and unfulfilled subscription totals will be hidden.
How did we do this?
Let's look at what's actually happening at the transaction level.
From now on, when you sell a subscription, PatronManager will create a set of Payment Transaction Items that handle the distribution of the subscription funds. This happens on the very first transaction for the order at the time that the order is submitted, and will also trickle down to any subsequent refunds or exchanges on the subscription. It might look a little something like this:
What you're seeing here is the debiting and crediting of subscription funds between the "package" and its "events." And when you process an exchange on a subscription as a whole or on a fulfillment item, we can use this new handling to track the money back to the original subscription purchase.
This new transaction handling is happening in your account regardless of what point you're at in your season -- we're just hiding the results in your Box Office Reports until you have a brand new complete season that's eligible for Enhanced Subscription Reporting.
Now that I know this, do I need to do anything?
Maybe! Depending on the type of subscriptions you're currently selling, and depending on the course of your season, you (or we) may need to manually disable Enhanced Subscription Reporting for some of your events in order to continue selling and fulfilling without a hitch.
If you're selling Fixed or Choose Your Own Subscriptions:
Again, if you're mid-season, PatronManager will "know" it already, and automatically check the "Disable Enhanced Subscription Reporting" box on all Events that are part of the season (which is the thing that controls all this fancy reporting stuff). But if you change an event mid-season and need to exchange all of your subscribers into the new event (for example, if a particular artist cancels and you need to replace that show with a brand new one for all your subscribers), you'll need to check the "Disable Enhanced Subscription Reporting" checkbox on the new event by hand when you create that replacement event -- because even though the event itself is "new" to the system, it's still part of the current season.
If you're selling Pick Later Subscriptions
If you are currently selling Pick Later subscriptions and have not yet created all of the events that will be offered as part of your season OR you have not yet started exchanging out placeholders, you will need to check the "Disable Enhanced Subscription Reporting" checkbox by hand on all events intended to be part of the pick later subscription series. (Again, this is because even though the events are newly-created, they're still part of the current season and need to be marked accordingly.)
For everyone selling subscriptions:
If Enhanced Subscription Reporting isn't enabled for your current season, and for any reason you try to exchange or fulfill this season's subscriptions with a "new" event that isn't meant to be part of this season, you'll get a warning message that tries to stop you from doing that. This is because we want to make sure that you'll still be able to take advantage of Enhanced Subscription Reporting NEXT season! You probably don't want to "pollute" those new events by making them part of these old-style subscriptions.
Our data about client accounts shows that this should be a pretty rare case, but it happens on occasion -- we suggest that you contact us (by clicking the red "Submit a Support Request" button in the PatronManager Help tab) if this does come up for you and we'll help you determine the best course of action based on your specific situation.
Report Changes
All of the one-click Box Office Reports will adapt automatically to all these changes. However, any custom reports that were built using the Report Builder will not. These custom reports that you might be using to supplement the Box Office Reports -- ones we built for you, or taught you how to build yourself -- will need to be adapted.
While we're going to be automatically making some corrections to your custom reports as part of this upgrade, you should be aware of what's changing:
- If you're running a report based on transaction date that reports on ticketing revenue, you'll need to edit the report and add a filter to hide the new payment transaction items for subscription items. Your new filter should exclude all Payment Transaction Items with the Item Types of Fulfillment Item, Fulfillment Item Return, and Subscription Distribution.
- If you're running a report about subscription fulfillment revenue, you'll need to change the underlying report type! Your existing report was built on Ticket Order Items, but you'll need to switch to a report type that includes Payment Transaction Items and add a filter to evaluate for items where Subscription Order Item is not equal to blank.
(If you’d like help making any of these report changes, or if you’d just like to confirm that you did something right, feel free to contact the PatronManager Client Administration team by clicking the red "Submit a Support Request" button in the PatronManager Help tab.)