I work for a non-profit that has a summer concert series. We have regular donors who buy season tickets for certain seats. I'm currently in the process of entering these payments and receipting them. We don't have a field for specifically entering seat numbers, so I've been writing that into the description on opportunity records. Is there a better way to do that? Would making a custom field be the best approach? Some of these donors buy the same seats for years in a row and it seems worthwhile to be able to save that data somewhere in salesforce.
I would love any insight anyone has on tracking concert tickets in salesforce, whether related specifically to seats or more broadly. I'm fairly new to this job and my organization recently switched to salesforce, so I'm still learning all the systems.
@TJ Warfield - thank you for tagging me!
@Jennifer Bell - I think a custom field for tracking seat assignments would be a great start here, perhaps just a standard Text field. That way you can enter the data you have on hand in a more intentional way, and seating data will be more easily reportable and, bonus, usable as a merge field. I'd prefer this myself rather than having to store everything in the Description field, which can become so much of a "catchall" that it's unreliable for any specific use.
The majority of nonprofits that I work with who sell tickets do so via a ticketing tool that is either built upon Salesforce or is a separate platform that integrates with Salesforce - but you can continue to find ways of doing this yourself, that's one of the great things about Salesforce!
The organizations that I have seen selling tickets in Salesforce with a diy approach typically have a custom object (e.g. "Tickets") or utilize the Opportunity Product object to represent each individual ticket sold. These records are related back to the opportunity so that, in the end, the opportunity better represent someone's entire purchase.
- For example, John Doe might buy three tickets for $150 for seats A1, A2, A3. And in Salesforce, that would consist of four records:
- A $150 opportunity for John Doe that represents their entire purchase
- Three separate ticket records for A1 - A3, each related back to the opportunity
This approach is an increase in architectural complexity, but it does allow greater granularity in your reporting capabilities, especially if you built out the ticket object a little bit to track details not only about the seating but also the show itself, when it occurred, if they attended or didn't attend, etc. (you could utilize Campaigns to track these event details, look them up from the ticket, and use formula fields to pull those event details down).
Let me know if you have any questions on the above - if you're new to Salesforce, I know this can be a lot to take on! Be sure to check out the various Trailhead trainings available to you on here too.
- For example, John Doe might buy three tickets for $150 for seats A1, A2, A3. And in Salesforce, that would consist of four records:
