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Brand New Fees Setup Wizard (February 2016): https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/485137
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As we reviewed the wide variety of fee types you told us you wanted to be able to assess, we realized that supporting your requests required an entirely new and streamlined tool. As a result, we created a simple Fee Setup tool that allows you to combine or mix and match fees into a single set of easily configurable rules.
The new Fee Setup tool first guides you through choosing settings and criteria, and then it creates the rules that will trigger the fees you want.
Fee Setup Tab
The new Fee Setup tab is the one centralized location where all of your fee settings live. First, navigate to the Fee Setup tab by clicking on the "+" at the end of the navigation tab row to see a list of all available tabs.
Item Fees
You now have five item fee fields to work with, which allows you to break out different kinds of fees into separate fields for reporting purposes. If you choose to assess many different fees (such as a facility fee, a per-item, flat-rate credit card fee, or a fee for tickets sold online), you can choose the new "grouping" option to add them together and display them as one to your patrons so they aren't presented with a long list of item fees.
The first fee field listed is tied to the "Price Level"-related fee field that you've used up until now. The ability to set the fee amount based on the price level of the ticket remains, and with this new tool, you'll be able to more tightly control the scenarios in which it's assessed.
The other item fee fields can be configured as you wish.
Order Fees
As with item fees, you also have five order fee fields to work with. And just like item fees, you can opt to group the fees together so that they appear as one lump fee to your patrons. You might use these fields to charge an order fee for subscription orders, a fee for online orders, or an order fee on all orders except walk-ups.
When your account is upgraded, your existing order and delivery fee settings will be automatically mapped into the first two fields here, and will continue to function the same as they do now (so you won't need to take any action right away) -- but if you want to make changes, you'll be able to add new criteria to more tightly control the scenarios in which they apply.
Getting Started
While the tool is easy to use, there are a lot of questions that must be considered before implementing a new fee.
Planning: When and How to Begin
With all these new fees and rules, you might find yourself wondering what's going to happen to your existing orders and events. Are old orders and events compatible with the new fee structure? Can this be implemented mid-season?
The answer to both of those questions is "yes!" Still, that doesn't mean you should just dive right in. The upgrade process is designed to seamlessly transition you from the old fee setup to the new. This means that immediately after the release, your fees will work identically to the way they did before, and any orders processed before the release will be unaffected. However, enabling a new fee should be done in conversation with your staff to avoid confusion and surprises. Any new fees you introduce will appear in your box office reporting immediately (we'll talk about reporting in a later lesson), so you'll want to pick a good moment and make sure everyone knows when you're making any changes.
Implementation: Five Steps
There are a lot of questions that must be considered before implementing a new fee, so we encourage you to read this training article before getting started. If after you read that, you're still unsure about any piece of this process, you can always submit a support request through the Help Tab in your PatronManager account and we'll give you a hand at making sure that all of the right questions are asked before getting started.
We won't go through all the details here in the release notes, but here's a quick walkthrough of how you might set up a new fee using the new Fee Setup tool (click the image to enlarge):
- Choose the fee slot you'd like to use.
- Choose display settings and rules about waiving.
- Choose the criteria you want to incorporate into your rules.
- Create your rules.
- Confirm.
A Closer Look
The last step in the process is a confirmation page that allows you to view all of the settings you chose, and double check that you've gotten it all right. Here's what it might look like if you configured a Facility Fee that's $1.50 per single ticket for the Capitol Theatre, and $1.00 per single ticket for the Curve Theater:
Checking Your Work
You can see that you got it right by adding an item from each venue to an order, and seeing that the correct fees are added:
Don't Stop Here!
Head to the next article to learn what these new and improved fees will look like when you process orders.