The questions to ask, the fees to watch for, and how to keep control of your own patron data.
You are about to sit through a lot of demos, and they will all go well. That is what a demo is for.
A simple event, a clean seating chart, a sale that goes through on the first try. None of it tells you what a Friday night in your house is going to feel like.
These are the questions we would ask if we were sitting on your side of the table. Where it is useful, we have said plainly what TixPro 8 does, so you can hold us to the same list as everybody else.
Worth settling before you talk to anyone, because it decides which category of tool you are shopping in.
If you are selling one event and will not need any of it again — a single fundraiser, a conference — a general-purpose event platform will likely handle it, probably for less. Those tools are built for exactly that.
A box office system is a different kind of thing. It is built around what outlasts the event: the patron who came last season, the donor record, the subscriber, the comps, the exchange, the report your board wants in March. All of that matters more than how often you sell. A theater that opens for six weeks in summer needs the same things as one that runs all year.
If you are not sure, the difference shows up the first time somebody asks a question about last year. Who came to the winter show? Who gave twice and hasn't this season? Who should get the first email about the fall production? Being able to answer those at all is the whole difference. A general event tool sells tickets. A box office system remembers who bought them.
Systems built around reserved seating generally assume a computer or a tablet at the window, with a separate device for scanning at the door. A few are built phone-first. Worth asking what each one expects, and what that means for seating either way.
How much this matters depends on where selling actually happens. A fixed window settles the question on its own. Selling from a gate, a field, or wherever the line forms that night makes it the first thing to ask.
Ask about the connection while you are there. Anything browser-based needs internet to sell, so it is worth knowing what happens if the wifi goes down twenty minutes before curtain — whether there is an offline mode, a hotspot plan, or nothing.
Before any demo, write down how you actually sell. Reserved, general admission, or both on the same night. Subscriptions, flex passes, classes, comps for the board, the section you hold for the director until Thursday.
Then ask each vendor to show you that, rather than their rehearsed event. A demo is a performance. What you want to watch is what happens when you hand them your odd case — how they react when you say “we also do this weird thing.”
The weird thing is the point. Every venue has one, and how a vendor handles yours on a sales call is a preview of how they will handle it in the future.
There are usually three numbers, and not every vendor volunteers all three.
First, the platform fee — per ticket or per order, flat or a percentage. Second, card processing — a percentage plus a few cents, which goes to a payment processor. Third, anything monthly — a subscription, a minimum, a charge per user.
Then ask the question that actually decides your cost: can the fee be passed to the patron, and is that your choice or theirs?
Fees come in two shapes. A flat amount per ticket costs the same whatever the ticket costs; a percentage grows with the price. Which one works out better depends entirely on what you charge, so run both against your own average ticket price rather than the one in their example.
This is where the surprises live. Ask about each of these by name: cash and check sales, comps, free tickets, free events, donations, exchanges and refunds, and season renewals.
Ask which tickets get counted. It's almost never just the paid ones.
Some systems won't bill a comp you hand out at the window, but will bill that same seat if it came from a season pass. Others charge nothing on comps or cash at all. One makes free tickets free right up until you use a seating chart, at which point they start counting.
None of this is hidden. It's sitting on their pricing pages. It just isn't the number anyone leads with, and it tends to land on subscriptions, passes, and the seats you give away to fill a room.
Three things to ask for: the length of the term, how renewal works, and whether a price increase is written into it.
Renewal is the one that catches people. If a contract renews on its own unless you cancel sixty days ahead, that date is worth putting in a calendar the day you sign.
And ask what happens if it isn't working out mid-season. Not because you expect that, but because a vendor who answers it easily is telling you something.
Twenty years of names — what they bought, what they gave. For most venues that list is the most valuable thing they own, and it's the one asset that lives entirely inside somebody else's software.
Ask three things. Can you export it yourself, without filing a request. Does the export include the history — attendance, giving, order records — or only names and email addresses. And does it cost anything.
The answers vary more than you'd expect, and the gap between “you can download it” and “we can prepare that for you” is the gap between a file and a favor.
This isn't only about leaving, either. It's about whether you can hand your board a donor list on a Thursday, run your own mail merge, or check a number without waiting on somebody else to pull it.
Ask what happens between signing and your first on-sale, and which parts of it are billed. There are usually four: building your seating charts, moving your patron and donor data across, training whoever works the window, and setting up your ticket format.
Every vendor includes some and quotes for the rest, which is fair enough. What matters is knowing which is which before you sign, with a number attached to anything that isn't included.
Data migration is where the surprises are biggest, so ask what the price depends on. “It depends on the shape of your old data” is an honest answer, but it should come with a range. And ask what it costs to change things later — another chart, a new ticket format, another user. Setup is a one-time bill. Being charged every time you want to adjust something is a permanent one.
“We offer support” means nothing on its own. Ask who picks up — a person or a web form. Ask what hours, in what time zone, and what happens outside them. Ask whether the person answering has ever sold a ticket from a box office.
Then ask the one that gets an honest answer: what is your average response time, and what is the worst it has been this year?
Ask what support costs, too. Some vendors sell it in tiers, where a faster response is an upgrade, and that price tends to surface after the software price has already been agreed.
This is the easiest claim on the whole list to verify. Call the support line before you sign anything and see who picks up.
The people who work your window often aren't the people choosing the software. Part-timers, students, the parent who volunteered back in September — they're the ones there on a Tuesday.
Ask how training works, who does it, and what it costs. Some vendors train your whole staff once, for a fee. Some train a few people well enough that they can bring the rest up themselves. The second sounds like less until you think about turnover: if the vendor has to be there every time somebody new starts, you can't staff your own window without booking them first.
Then ask about permissions — what each person can see and do, and who decides it. Set well, permissions are what let you hand the window to anyone without thinking twice about it.
Last one, and the least interesting, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Scanners: does it need theirs, or will a phone do? Card readers: which ones work, who supplies them, and do they plug into the sale or sit off to the side? Printers and ticket stock: is the stock proprietary, and what does it cost?
None of it is a dealbreaker on its own. Proprietary hardware isn't automatically a bad sign — it's just a cost that turns up after you've signed, when you have less room to ask about it.
A one-page version, meant to be printed and written on. It has room for the vendor's name and your notes, so you can put the same questions to everyone and compare the answers afterward.
Print the one-page checklist ↓Center Stage Software has been making box office software since 1985. We spent years working the window ourselves before taking over the company, and most of these questions come from that side of the counter. They are the ones we wish somebody had handed us.
Ask all of them — of us, and of everyone else you talk to. If the answers bring you our way, we would be glad. Either way you will buy better than you would have.