Batch Ticket Printing

How long do you think it takes you to go through will-call orders one by one – printing tickets and sorting them by name or event – so that you can greet folks as they walk in the door? Or do you mail tickets to patrons that purchase by phone or online? That task is about to get significantly easier in Altru.

Currently, users must search for each order that contains unprinted tickets and print them transaction by transaction. One customer estimated that it takes her 3.5 hours each week to print out will-call tickets for families that have purchased tickets online or by phone. It’s not a weekly activity for her, but it happens often enough that it’s painful.

The new batch printing task accessible through the Sales area allows a user to select tickets to print by date, delivery method, event, or patron. You can include Daily Admission tickets as well as those for scheduled events and programs. And of course, you can print out a header card for each order – either your default will call header or your default mailing header. You’ll get a count of tickets to be printed so that you can double check that you’re not about to print too many or too few. If you need to print these during business hours, you can select a specific printer so that you don’t interfere with normal sales activity at the front desk.

Because Altru printing includes communication between the browser and a printer attached to your network, the browser window must remain open during the print job, but you can launch another Altru window to keep working while the batch of tickets is printing.

Once you print a batch of tickets, that batch will appear in a “batch history” section, where you can reprint any batch or drill into the batch to see the individual tickets that were included, which can also be reprinted if necessary.

So what will you do with the 3.5 hours / week you just saved? We’d be interested in hearing how much time this actually saves you.

You can keep up with us on Twitter by following @bbsupport; we use the hashtag #bbaltru when we discuss Altru. Take a look at our Twitter Guide for more information.

Check out the Altru Community to submit ideas, ask questions and network with fellow Altru users.