Box Office (ticketing)

Box Office is Prompter's ticketing. Sell tickets to your performances, check people in at the door, and keep the money side straight, all connected to the show you're already running.

You will find Box Office under Box Office in the menu on the left, both for your organisation and inside each production.

Screenshots show the light theme. The app looks the same in dark.

Switching it on

Box Office is an opt-in module. To take real payments, your organisation also needs to be connected to Stripe. This is how payouts reach your bank. Until both are set up, ticket sales stay switched off.

Turning it on can start selling straight away

The Box Office switch is the only thing holding a ready show off its buy page. A show is ready when it is public, has tickets switched on, is in the Production phase, has a date still to come and a ticket type, and has payouts connected. A ready show goes on sale the moment you turn Box Office on, and people can pay immediately.

Prompter tells you before that happens and names the show, so you can turn tickets off on it first if you're not ready to sell. If nothing is waiting to sell, turning Box Office on is a single click.

A free event is named too, and Prompter says people can book instead of pay. Free event tickets don't need payouts set up, so those seats can go the moment the module is on.

Switching Box Office off is the safe direction. It pauses every live Buy button and deletes nothing.

If Prompter says Stripe is holding your money

Stripe asks two separate questions about your account: can you take payments, and will it pay you out. Those can be in different states. Usually Stripe wants identity documents or bank details before it releases your first payout.

If that happens, the Box Office payouts panel tells you.

• Nothing is lost. Your takings are sitting in your Stripe balance and come through as soon as verification finishes.
• You can keep selling. We don't switch ticket sales off for this. A hold is only a delay.
• The fix is in Stripe. Open Manage payouts on Stripe and answer what it asks for. We can't verify you on Stripe's behalf, so go to Stripe first. Contacting us will only slow it down.

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How to put a show on sale

1. Open the production's Box Office.
2. Work through Getting this show on sale. It lists every outstanding step and links to each.
3. When every step is done, turn Tickets on sale on.

The toggle stays locked until the checklist is complete.

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Before a show can sell

All of these must be in place. Box Office ▸ Sales tells you which one is still missing:

• Box Office is switched on for your organisation, and Stripe is connected
• your organisation has a contact email address (Organisation ▸ Details). If it has none, the Turn on Box Office card asks for one and saves it for you.
• the production has reached the Production phase
• there's at least one on-sale performance still to come, and one paid ticket type
• the show is marked public
• you've turned on Tickets on sale

A show that isn't marked public can't sell, even when everything else is set up. The switch is "Show this production publicly" on the show's Presence ▸ Public Website tab. If the public website is switched off for your organisation, that tab is hidden. Box Office then offers you the same switch on the Sales page.

You don't need a public website to sell tickets. You need the show marked public. The website can stay off. Buyers reach your ticket page by the link you share, or through the What's On embed.

How the buy page looks. If your public website is on, the buy page and the page where buyers see their tickets use your website's theme. If it is off, they are light by default, in cream and gold. To make them dark, open Organisation ▸ Settings ▸ General and choose Dark under Public page appearance. Your audition pages use the same setting.

Why we insist on a contact address

You can't switch Box Office on without one, and you can't remove it while you're selling.

A show can have its own address for buyers' questions. Set the production contact email in Production ▸ Details. Buyers then see it on their ticket email, their ticket PDF and their order page, and a reply to a ticket email goes there. Without one, they use your organisation's contact email. Your public buy page shows your organisation's address, unless you tick Show on public pages in Production ▸ Details. Your receipt always names your organisation as the seller.

Ticket money goes straight to your bank through Stripe, so you are the seller. Your company's name is on the buyer's bank statement, not Prompter's. A buyer who doesn't recognise a charge and can't find anyone to ask will ring their bank. That becomes a chargeback against you. One address on your ticket and your confirmation email prevents most of that.

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When online sales stop

Online sales stop at curtain up: the start time printed on the ticket. A performance sells until it begins, and then it stops. Selling on the door is unaffected. This is only about buying online.

Each night of a run drops off your Buy Tickets page as it begins, so a five-night run carries on selling the other four. Nothing is deleted. The performance stays in your Box Office with its sales and its door scanner.

Once every performance has started, your Buy Tickets page stops offering a sale. It tells visitors the show is no longer on sale, with a link back to the rest of your website. It doesn't show them a "page not found", so somebody who follows a link off an old poster or an email still gets an answer. Tickets already bought stay valid, and your door scanner keeps working.

Box Office ▸ Sales says the same thing from your side: "Every performance has passed its sales cutoff, so add a new date to sell tickets." Add a performance in the future and you're selling again straight away.

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What you sell in

Your organisation sells in one currency. It is the Currency you chose when you set it up, which follows your country unless you changed it. Every ticket price you enter is in that currency.

An Owner or Admin can change it later under Organisation ▸ Box Office, but only until your first ticket sells. After that it's fixed. Past orders keep the currency they were bought in, and two currencies in one organisation would make your reports disagree with your payouts. If it must change after you've sold, get in touch. Don't work around it.

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Which payment methods your buyers see

Card is always there. Buyers may also be offered a digital wallet like Apple Pay, Google Pay or Link, and, if you choose to allow it, a buy-now-pay-later option such as Klarna.

You choose this, not Prompter. Your Stripe account is your own, so the setting lives in your Stripe dashboard, under Settings ▸ Payment methods. Open it from Organisation ▸ Box Office ▸ Manage payouts on Stripe. Prompter has no screen for it.

Prompter sets a sensible starting point for every organisation, and you can change it from there. If a method is greyed out and can't be switched on, that one is not available to organisations on Prompter.

You cannot switch on direct debit. A direct debit is accepted at the checkout but takes up to two working days to clear. A ticket is issued the moment it sells, so the buyer would get a seat before the money arrived. Bank transfers and voucher payments are blocked for the same reason.

Your own Produce+ subscription is different. A New Zealand organisation can pay its own subscription by direct debit. A subscription can wait two days for the money to clear.

If you check the buy page yourself:

• A wallet you can't see may still be working. Apple Pay only appears on Apple devices and in Safari. Google Pay only appears in Chrome with a card saved. A check on your own laptop tells you only about your laptop.
• Some methods only appear for certain countries or amounts. Buy-now-pay-later in particular hides itself on small purchases, so a $5 test ticket is not a fair test of it.

Choose whether to allow buy-now-pay-later. Don't just leave the default. It can lift sales on higher-priced tickets. Some companies feel it sits badly with their audience: a charity fundraiser is a different thing from a $60 musical. It costs you nothing either way. You are paid in full, and the buyer settles with the provider.

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How to add ticket types

1. Open the production's Box Office ▸ Ticket types.
2. Add a type, give it a name and a price.
3. Repeat for each price a buyer might choose between.

A free Comp is a ticket type like any other, priced at zero.

Tickets that only come with another

Some tickets should only be sold alongside another one: a free Companion Card seat for a carer, a child ticket that needs an adult, an afterparty ticket that needs a show ticket.

1. Add the ticket type as usual, and give it its price — 0 for a free carer seat.
2. Under Only sold with, choose the ticket it comes with.
3. Set how many each of those tickets allows. One carer per cardholder is 1; "up to three children with each adult" is 3.
4. If you like, write the message a buyer sees when they get it wrong.

A buyer can't check out with the companion ticket on its own, or with more of them than the rule allows. The buy page says so before they pay: beside the ticket on a general admission night, and in the ticket-type choice for each seat on a reserved night.

Nobody is asked for proof online. Prompter never stores anything about a person's disability. Check the card at the door, as you do now.

A free companion ticket adds no fee. One with a price is an ordinary ticket and carries the usual fees. Your sales report lists it by name, so "Companion Card × 12" is there when a funder asks.

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How to add performances

1. Open the production's Box Office ▸ Performances.
2. Add each night of the run, with its date and time.
3. Set the capacity and the seating mode.

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Selling tickets

Set up your performances and ticket types, and your public Buy Tickets page handles the rest. Buyers choose a performance, pay, and get a confirmation email with QR tickets attached. Prompter tracks capacity for each performance, so you can't oversell a house.

Each performance can name the venue it plays at. You pick it from your venues, so you don't type it each time. This helps when a matinee moves to a different hall. If you've given that venue a street address, it prints on the ticket, the confirmation email and your Buy Tickets page. Add one: the ticket is what somebody has open in the car on the way to a hall they've never been to.

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What your buyer receives

Their confirmation email is a receipt. It shows each ticket type and how many, the booking fee, the total, your organisation's name, your tax number if you've entered one, a booking reference like 7CDEB6A9, and the date.

The sale is legally yours. The money goes to your bank, so you're the supplier. If your society is GST registered, this receipt is what your buyers can claim against.

Prompter doesn't work out the tax inside your ticket prices, and won't. It reports what was charged and under whose registration. We don't know your rate, or whether you're registered or exempt. Many UK societies' ticket sales are exempt entirely. Tax on your ticket sales stays your business.

Each ticket fills its own A4 page. A buyer with a guest who arrives separately can forward that guest's page alone. Or they can use Send this ticket on their order page, which opens one ticket as a PDF with no booking reference. Anyone who has that file or link can use the ticket, and the link stops working if the ticket is refunded or cancelled. The page shows the seat (on a reserved night), the QR code, your show's poster (or the event's image), and your venue with a QR code for directions. Your conditions of entry and contact address print on every page.

Add a Poster image to the production (Production settings ▸ Public Images) to put it on the tickets. Without one, Produce+ organisations get their logo there, and free organisations get a panel with the show's title. On the free tier, each page also carries a small Prompter band at the foot.

The link in that email doesn't expire. Opening it again gives them their QR tickets, the PDF, the receipt and an Add to calendar button. So when someone says they've lost their tickets, point them at the email. You don't need to reissue anything. If an order was refunded, trust that page over the email. The page is rebuilt each time it's opened. The email is frozen at the moment it was sent.

They can also put the performance straight in their diary. The email carries a calendar file that opens in Apple Calendar or Outlook, plus a Google Calendar link. The entry has the show, your venue and address, their booking reference and your contact address. If they add it from both the email and the order page, they still get one entry.

The calendar entry has no Accept / Decline buttons. It's a diary entry, not an invitation. A reply from those buttons would come to you by email, where nothing reads it, so the buyer would think they had told you something.

The day before, they get a reminder. At 9am in your organisation's timezone, Prompter emails every buyer whose performance is tomorrow. It gives the time, when the doors open, the venue and its address, their seats, and the tickets again, with your contact address at the bottom. You don't send anything.

There's no reminder for a performance you've cancelled, because those buyers already have the cancellation email. Somebody who booked in the last 24 hours doesn't get one either, because their confirmation is only hours old. The reminder carries no prices. The receipt stays in the confirmation.

Events show a finish time on the ticket, because the event form asks for one. Production performances show a start time and doors, but no finish time.

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Your conditions of entry

Latecomers, cancellations, refunds, photography, resale: these are your company's own rules. You write them once under Organisation ▸ Box Office ▸ Conditions of entry, and every ticket buyer sees them.

The buyer sees them before they pay. A link beside the payment button, "[your company]'s conditions of entry", opens them without losing the basket. They then appear in full on the confirmation email, the order page and the ticket itself.

Changing them later

You can edit your conditions whenever you like, and doing so doesn't rewrite history. Each order keeps the conditions the buyer agreed to when they bought. So if you tighten a policy for next season, everyone who has already bought keeps seeing the version they bought under, on their order page and on a re-downloaded ticket. New buyers see the new version.

Each rule has its own box and its own tick:

• Tick it to include it, and edit the wording to suit your company.
• Untick it and the wording greys out but stays there. Turn a rule off for one season and it's waiting for you the next. You don't have to write it again.
• Reset wording puts our suggested text back, for when you've changed your mind or made a mess of it.
• Anything else at the bottom is for a rule the five boxes don't cover: under-12s, the bar, access.

A panel underneath shows exactly what your buyers will read.

Nothing is published until you press Save, and nothing is filled in for you. A rule you've never ticked publishes nothing, even though you can see it in the editor. These become your company's published terms, so only an Owner or Admin can change them.

Leave everything unticked and no conditions are shown anywhere.

A warning about "no refunds"

If your conditions say "no refunds", or "non-refundable", with no exception, a yellow notice appears under the preview. In many countries the law gives a buyer rights that a ticket condition can't remove, such as a refund when you cancel the show. A plain "no refunds" can mislead buyers, and buyers often blame the ticketing site as well as you.

The notice offers one sentence: "This does not affect your rights under consumer law." Press Add this sentence and it goes into Anything else, where you can still edit it. You can also ignore the notice. It never stops you saving, and the words stay yours.

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General admission or reserved seating

Every performance is sold one of three ways, chosen when you add or edit it under How seats are sold. New performances start as general admission, and you can change it right up until the first ticket sells.

• General admission. A ticket admits one person, without naming a seat. Buyers choose how many they want, and the capacity you set stops the house overselling.
• Reserved seating. Buyers pick their own seats. This needs the performance's venue to have a layout with seats placed on it. The map is the capacity here, so the capacity box is set aside.
• Reserved seating, whole tables. For a cabaret night: buyers take a table at a time instead of picking chairs.

It's one choice for the whole performance, not a setting on each table. If some tables need to sell differently, sell a different performance a different way.

On a reserved performance, buyers see your room drawn in the same colours as the rest of your buy page, with the stage where you put it. They can switch to a plain list of seats instead. This helps on a small phone, and it's how the page works for anyone using a keyboard or a screen reader. A seat is held for about five minutes while they make up their mind, and stays held while they pay, so nobody is undercut halfway through checking out. The page shows how long is left, and in the last minute they can keep their seats with one tap.

Below the tickets, the page asks anyone who needs help with access to contact you at your contact address before they book. Prompter doesn't ask buyers about their access needs or store them. The conversation is yours. If they choose a wheelchair space, the page offers a companion seat in the same row or table. It doesn't add one for them. They choose whether to take it, and it costs the same as any other seat.

Choosing which layout you sell

If the venue has more than one layout — Full House, Cabaret, Stalls Only — the performance form asks which one this night is sold from. A venue with a single layout doesn't ask. It uses that one.

Once a seat has sold, the layout can't be swapped. A sold ticket names a seat in that layout, such as Table 3, Seat 2. Refund those tickets, or add a new performance.

Your show's own seating

Box Office ▸ Venues shows the seating this production is actually selling, and it is yours to edit. It's your show's own copy of the layout. A change here, such as a seat out for the sound desk or a row shortened, affects this show and nothing else. Your Production Secretary can make it without needing an org Admin.

The same page has a Preview button. It opens your real Buy Tickets page in a window, exactly as a buyer will see it, with the purchase button switched off. Nothing is held and nothing can be bought. Use it to check the room looks right before you go on sale.

Selling by the table

On whole tables, a buyer clicks a table and takes all of it or none. It appears as one line in their basket, "Table 3, 8 seats". It costs exactly what those seats cost: the seat count times your ordinary ticket price, so a table of eight at $30 is $240. There's no separate table price to set anywhere, and if you change your ticket price the table's total follows it.

Before you turn it on:

• Rows are never sold whole, whatever you choose. Only tables go as a unit, so a room with rows down one side and tables at the front still sells those rows chair by chair.
• A seat you've marked unavailable isn't part of the sale. A table of eight with one broken chair sells as seven, and is priced as seven.
• The buyer still gets one ticket per seat, so they can hand them round to the people joining them.
• It's all-or-nothing everywhere else too. You can't comp one chair of a table sold whole, sell one at the door, block one, or refund one. That stops a table ending up half-sold and unsellable.

The seat then follows the ticket everywhere. It is printed on the ticket, named in the confirmation email, shown on the order page, and shown to your usher when the ticket is scanned at the door. The words are the same each time.

You can't change how a performance is sold once it has sold a ticket, in any direction. Refund those tickets first, or add a new performance and sell that one the way you want.

Which hall a performance plays in

Your show names a venue, and so does each performance. They're separate so that a matinee can play somewhere else.

A new performance picks up the show's venue automatically, because the usual case is playing the same hall every night. Change it on the performance itself only when that night is elsewhere.

The performance's venue is the one that sells tickets. It's the seat map a buyer picks from. So if your show says one hall and its performances say another, your public page advertises one building while your buy page sells seats in a different one. Prompter tells you when that happens: the show's details panel lists any performances at another venue and offers to move them across. If you meant it, leave them where they are.

You can't change a performance's venue once a seat has sold on it. Refund those tickets first, or add a new performance at the new venue. This only applies to reserved seating. A general admission ticket doesn't name a seat, so those performances can move whenever you need.

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Sales you take yourself

Sold a ticket for cash on the door, or on your own EFTPOS machine? Record it, so the seat is taken and the ticket scans like any other.

1. Open Box Office ▸ Sales and press Record a sale.
2. Choose the performance and the ticket type. On a reserved-seating night, tick the seats.
3. Choose How they paid: cash, your own EFTPOS, bank transfer or other. On Produce+, also choose where it was Sold at: the door, your box office, or one of your outlets.
4. Enter the buyer's name and email. Prompter emails them their tickets and a receipt.
5. If the buyer has no email address, tick They have no email address instead. Never type a made-up address.
6. Press Record sale, then Print tickets to hand them paper tickets. Each one has a code that scans at the door.

Prompter charges no fee on a sale you take yourself, because the money never went through Prompter. The sale shows in your sales report and budget at its ticket price.

Every order in the list under Sales also has a Print button, so you can print any buyer's tickets again later.

Outlets and the cash-up (Produce+)

If an i-SITE, a shop or another outlet sells tickets for you, add it once under Organisation ▸ Box Office ▸ Sales points. Door and Box office are always there. When you record a sale, pick the outlet under Sold at. An outlet you stop using can be switched off; its past sales still show its name.

Box Office ▸ Sales then shows a cash-up of the sales you took yourself: the total after refunds, by payment method and by sales point. The orders download (CSV) has Paid by and Sold at columns on every plan.

Sell links for volunteers and outlets (Produce+)

A box office volunteer or an outlet does not need a Prompter login to record sales. Give them a sell link instead.

1. Open Organisation ▸ Box Office ▸ Sales points.
2. Under the sales point (Door, Box office or an outlet), press New sell link.
3. Leave every show unticked to let the link sell all your shows that are on sale, or tick the shows it may sell.
4. Press Create link, then Copy link and send it to the volunteer or the outlet.

Whoever opens the link can record a sale, choose how the buyer paid, and print the tickets. Every sale is placed at that link's sales point. The link shows only the sales made through it, and it cannot refund, cancel or see anything else. Press Switch off when you no longer want it to work. It stops at once. Treat a link like a key: anyone you forward it to can use it.

On the free plan, you can record a sale only on the day of the performance: the door sales. Advance tickets go online. On Produce+ you can record a sale for any performance, for example from a counter or a phone booking paid by bank transfer.

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Comps and the door

Issue complimentary tickets for reviewers, sponsors, or cast guests without taking payment. On the night, the usher door scanner reads each ticket's QR code and checks that person in. A ticket already scanned won't scan twice. Your sold count includes everyone who's valid or checked in, so your numbers stay right through the door.

Cancelling a comp

Comped the wrong person? Open Box Office ▸ Comps. Every comp you've issued is listed there; press Cancel beside the one to withdraw. The ticket stops working at the door straight away, and its seat goes back on sale. A comp that has already been scanned in can't be cancelled.

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Refunds, fees and chargebacks

These have their own article: Box Office money. It also covers tickets that never arrive, GST and asking your audience to round up.

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