February 9, 2011

New Feature: Transaction Reporting

A few days ago, our newest team member Adam Bachman pushed out a welcome new feature to the Tixato beta: transaction reporting.


Reports

One thing we heard from beta testers was that some ticketing products have very limited abilities to summarize your data, or let you manipulate it on your own.

We wanted to solve this problem with a two-part strategy:

  1. Offer good, built-in reporting tools.
  2. Offer clean, raw, downloadable data for all you Excel jockies.

With the addition of the new “Reports” tab in Tixato, you’ll find both these things.

You can view default reports, such as “summary of all events”, or “summary of all performances”, or you can go to the Report Builder and create your own custom report. (You can also save your custom reports for later.)

Plus, for any report within Tixato, be it a sales summary or the full details of every ticket sold, you can always download that report as a raw comma-separated-value (CSV) document, for easy import into your favorite spreadsheet.

I’m pretty happy with this first version, but as always we know you’ll see things to improve that we missed. So please don’t be shy — let us know how, and we’ll improve it!

Posted by Chris

4 Comments

  1. Paul says at

    March 15, 2011 at 9:21 pm

    With our current system, it is difficult to report lists of patrons with with multiple variables. For example, our current system cannot report patrons who have seen HAMLET and ROCKY HORROR (for example).

    I have just started looking at what you’re building and do not know if you have thought about adding donor/charitable giving functionality. If so, we have a similar problem…for example…we have a hard time creating a list (for phone call, email and snail mail purposes) of people who, for example, bought tickets to HAMLET, and gave under $100 in the last adjustible period of time.

  2. Chris says at

    March 16, 2011 at 10:17 am

    Hi Paul!

    This is helpful to know. Thank you. We are definitely interested in charitable giving functionality.

    I think I’ve been in contact with one of your colleagues earlier today as a new beta tester in Tixato, so I’d love to hear how we should adjust or improve the reporting features so you can accomplish the things you need.

    Also, our hope is that by providing all the data in “raw” form, it will always be possible to process it outside of Tixato (for example using Excel) for any reporting queries that we may not have implemented yet.

    Cheers,
    Chris

  3. Cailen says at

    March 29, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    The reporting function is a welcom addition – Thanks. Something that I see that I need is the ability to look at total sales by discount type for each performance. I know I could export the csv file and try to make excel count it, but I am looking for something along the lines of this:

    Performance A
    General Admission – $100 – 10 Tickets
    Student – $50 – 10 Tickets
    Comp – $0 – 30 Tickets

    I would think that wouldn’t be too hard to do, but I don’t know whether you are tracking discount types in your sales records. I hope this is something that can be implemented, as this is the primary way we need data from the ticketing system. It makes it really easy for us (an educational institution) to quantify student impact of programming, etc.

    Thanks for all your work!

  4. Chris says at

    March 30, 2011 at 4:16 pm

    Thanks for the feedback Cailen! I’ve added your description to our internal issue tracker so we have it for reference. We’ll look in to this.

Leave a comment