Products and prices

This article explains what a product is, how you create one, and how you attach a price to it. By the end you will have at least one thing on sale in your ticket shop. Allow half an hour for your first product, and five minutes for every product after that.

What is a product?

A product is one thing a visitor can buy, with one name and one price. That is all it is.

If you sell admission to your museum to adults for 12 euros and to children for 6 euros, those are two products: Adult and Child. Not one product with two prices. That feels roundabout, but it is deliberate: every product has its own counter (how many have been sold), its own VAT rate and its own line on the invoice. The moment you squeeze those three things into one product, something stops adding up at the end of the year.

A product does not have to be a ticket. These are all products:

• an admission ticket for your museum;
• a seat at the table at the dinner event;
• a guided tour of an hour and a half;
• a supporter ticket of 10 euros for someone who is not coming but does want to help;
• a gift voucher.

What comes out at the end does differ. Most products produce a scannable ticket: a QR code in your visitor's email, which you scan at the door. A gift voucher produces no ticket but a balance, and a season pass produces a pass that lasts a whole season.

Three types that look alike

When creating a product you choose a type. The type determines what is asked next: a time, a date or a balance. Three types are mixed up most often.

You want	Choose	Why
Visitors come whenever they like, on one day	Admission ticket	No time is attached. You count at the door.
Visitors have to choose a time	Ticket with a time slot	Every hour has its own number of seats.
Once only, on one date, with its own name	Event	Ends by itself after that date.

An admission ticket is the simplest case: you sell admission, the visitor comes on the day printed on the ticket, and you keep no diary. A ticket with a time slot sells per moment: the 2 p.m. guided tour has twenty seats, so does the 3 p.m. one, and they stand apart from each other — you create those moments under Time slots. An event is a one-off moment with a date of its own, such as Saturday's dinner event; after that date it disappears from your shop by itself. See Events.

The remaining types: Group (one line for a whole party), Guided tour (an accompanied visit at a fixed starting time), Series (a course or workshop series you sell in one go), Season pass (see Season passes) and Gift voucher (see Gift vouchers).

What you need beforehand

• An account with the Owner or Administrator role; only those two may manage products. See Staff and roles.
• Your organisation filled in, preferably with your venue: the country of your venue determines which VAT rates are proposed. See Setting up your organisation.
• The names and the amounts you want to sell. Write them down on a sheet of paper before you start; that is quicker than starting to think halfway.
• The VAT rate that applies to your tickets. If you do not know it, read the section on VAT below first.
• Half an hour.

If you come across a word you do not know, it is in the glossary.

Creating a product

Step 1 — opening the form

1. In the menu on the left, click Sales and then Products.
2. You now see a list of your products: name, type, venue, online price and an Active tick. If there is nothing there yet, you only see the message that there are no products yet. By default the list only shows your active products. Looking for an inactive product? Open the filters and set Active to No, or to the dash to see everything.
3. Click the New product button at the top right. The form opens.

Step 2 — the "What are you selling?" block

This block sits at the top and determines the rest of the form.

Field	What you fill in
Type	See the table above. Changes the form straight away.
Venue	Leave empty if the product applies at every venue. Only active venues are in it.
Internal code	Optional, for your own bookkeeping or till label.
Order	A number. Lower sits higher in your shop.
Active	Switched on. Off means: no longer on sale.
Name on the ticket	Asks for each participant's name when ordering.

Note: only switch on Name on the ticket when you really need those names, for a course with a participant list for instance. With ten separate tickets your visitor then types a name ten times, and that is exactly the moment at which somebody abandons the order.

Step 3 — the "VAT" block

Here you say which VAT rate applies to this product. There are two ways.

• Fill in a rate yourself. Leave Kind of sale on None — I fill in a rate myself and type a percentage under VAT rate: 6 or 21, not 0.21. That rate stays until you change it yourself.
• Let the rate come from your VAT set. Under Kind of sale, choose what you are selling, Admission ticket for instance. The rate then comes from the VAT set that appears below it; Passavo proposes the set based on the country of your venue. The VAT rate field then shows the rate from the set and you cannot change it (if the set makes no proposal for that kind, you still fill it in yourself). If your accountant says something else for this particular product, switch on Own rate on this product and type the rate yourself.

How VAT sets work is explained in VAT sets. If you are unsure which rate you need, read the section on VAT below first.

Step 4 — name and description, per language

You see one name field and one description per language your ticket shop shows. If you only run Dutch, there is one field. If you also run French and English, three pairs sit below one another. Only your default language is required: if you leave a translation empty, the shop falls back to your default language for that visitor instead of showing an empty box. See Languages.

The description appears in your shop underneath the name. Put in two sentences what the visitor gets: "Access to the permanent collection and the temporary exhibition. Children under six free."

Step 5 — capacity

This block can be folded open and may be left entirely empty. What you leave empty is not limited.

Field	What it does
Maximum per order	How many items somebody may buy in one go.
Minimum number	The smallest number, a group minimum for instance.
Maximum per day	How many places you want to sell in one day. See the warning below.
Duration in minutes	How long a visit lasts. This number is passed on to resellers, and the generator under Time slots suggests it automatically.

Note: Maximum per day is not a hard limit in your own shop or at the desk. The number appears in your overviews and applies to sales through resellers, but your ticket shop and your till simply keep selling once it has been reached. If you want sales to really stop at a number of places, work with time slots: the capacity of a time slot is enforced everywhere.

If you leave Maximum per order empty, a generous upper limit of twenty items still applies in your ticket shop. That is not nannying: an open field sooner or later produces an order of a thousand tickets that nobody unwinds again.

Step 6 — the blocks that belong to a type

Below the capacity, more blocks appear depending on the type you chose. For an Event or a Series that is The event, with the date (see Events). For a Season pass it is The season pass and for a Gift voucher The gift voucher. Most types also have two folded blocks: Image and doors for the wallet pass (see Wallet passes) and Resellers. You may leave all of them empty.

Step 7 — saving

Click Create. You land straight on the edit screen of your new product, and that is where the real work begins: at the bottom sits the Prices block, and without a price your product is not in your shop.

VAT

This section is for anyone who has never worked with VAT before. If you already know it, read only the warning under the rates table.

What exactly is VAT?

VAT (value added tax) is a tax that sits in the price of almost everything. Your visitor pays 12 euros, and part of that is not yours: it belongs to the government. You collect it and hand it over later.

The rate differs per kind of sale. There is usually one standard rate (21% in Belgium) and one or two reduced rates for things the government wants to keep cheap: food, books, and in many countries culture as well.

The amount you fill in includes VAT

This matters. If you fill in 12 euros as the price, your visitor pays 12 euros. The VAT is in that amount, it is not added on top. At 21% that means: 9.92 euros for you and 2.08 euros VAT. That is how it should be on a ticket too: the visitor sees one amount and does not have to do sums. On the order and on the invoice the VAT is shown separately.

Do you have to charge VAT?

That depends on your organisation, not on this software.

• If you are liable for VAT (you have a VAT number and you file VAT returns), you charge the rate that belongs to your activity.
• If you are not liable for VAT — many small associations are not, and cultural institutions are often exempt for admission — you leave Kind of sale empty and simply fill in 0 as the VAT rate. No VAT is then calculated.

You fill in your VAT number once under Settings → Organisation. If you do not have one, leave the field empty. See Setting up your organisation.

The usual rates per country

This table is a starting point for the conversation with your accountant, not an answer. The rates apply to admission and culture, and that is precisely where most of the exceptions sit.

Country	Standard	Reduced	Admission and culture
Belgium	21%	6% (and 12%)	Often 6%, museums and monuments often exempt
Netherlands	21%	9%	Museums, theatre and attractions usually 9%
Germany	19%	7%	Museums and theatre usually 7%, sometimes exempt
France	20%	5.5% and 10%	Museums and monuments often 5.5% or exempt
Italy	22%	10% and 5%	Museums and performances often 10%
Spain	21%	10%	Museums, theatre and cinema usually 10%
Bulgaria	20%	9%	9% applies mainly to accommodation; admission often 20%

Note: this is indicative and the rates change regularly. Cultural admission is exempt or reduced in many countries, and whether that applies to your organisation depends on your legal form, your activity and your turnover. Check it with your accountant or with your tax authority. Passavo calculates exactly with the rate on your product and gives no tax advice.

How the rate is stored

You type a percentage. Internally that is stored as basis points — a hundredth of a per cent, so 21% becomes 2100 and 6.5% becomes 650. That sounds roundabout, but it is the reason 6.5% is still exactly 6.5% after a thousand orders and not 6.4999.

On every order line the rate is copied along. If you change your product's VAT rate later, an order from last month keeps showing the rate that applied then. That is exactly what you want: otherwise last quarter's VAT return would change retrospectively.

Prices per channel

A price always applies to one channel. A channel is the place where the sale happens.

Channel	Where
Online	Your public ticket shop
Desk	The till at the door
Reseller	Sale through a third party, such as a tourism platform

That way the same ticket can cost 12 euros online and 14 at the door, without you having to create two products. Many organisations do that deliberately: whoever books in advance gets a discount, and you know in advance how many people are coming. You can read more about the third channel under Resellers.

Adding a price

1. Open your product and scroll to the Prices block at the bottom.
2. Click Add a price. A window appears.
3. Choose the channel. Start with Online.
4. Fill in the amount in euros: 12 or 12.50. A comma is allowed too — on a Belgian keyboard everybody types one. Zero is allowed as well: a free registration is a price too.
5. Label is optional: a reminder for yourself, "early-bird discount" for instance. It appears in your price list; in the shop your visitor only sees the amount. Valid from left empty means: from now on; Valid up to and including left empty means: no end.
6. Click Create.

You now see the prices as a list, each with their channel, their amount and their validity:

The amount is stored in whole cents: 12.50 euros is 1250 cents. That way no half cent ever comes into play, and the total of a hundred orders adds up to the cent.

Note: a product without an online price is not in your ticket shop. That is not a fault but a safeguard: showing a product without a price as "free" is an expensive mistake. If you only want to sell something at the desk, give it a desk price only.

Prices are phased out, not overwritten

This is the most important rule on this screen.

If you want to raise the price of your ticket from 12 to 14 euros, you do not do the following: open the existing row and replace 12 with 14. You do this:

1. Click Edit next to the existing price and set Valid up to and including to the last day the old price still applies, 31 December for instance.
2. Click Save changes.
3. Click Add a price and create a new row for the same channel, with 14 euros and Valid from 1 January.

Why so roundabout? Because your price history has to keep showing what applied when, and a sale at the desk keeps pointing at the price row it was sold at. Whoever overwrites the old row changes what is in their price history retrospectively — and you only notice that when the accountant rings.

The amount on the order line is a copy in any case. Even if you change the price later, an old order keeps showing what the customer paid. The phasing out also keeps your price history readable: you can see what applied when.

If two prices for the same channel are valid at the same time, the shop takes the price with the most recent Valid from. Handy for a temporary promotional price, but also the place where a forgotten end date goes unnoticed. So always set one.

Order and copying

The list of products can be dragged. Above the list, click the Reorder records button (the icon with the arrows), grab a row by the handle on the left and drag it up or down. Then click Finish reordering records. That order is also the order in your ticket shop; put your best-selling product at the top.

A second ticket type usually differs only in name and amount. So do not create it from scratch, but use Copy next to the product in the list or at the top of the edit screen:

• a copy is added, with (copy) after the name;
• the prices come along;
• the copy is set to inactive, so you can check it over first;
• time slots, orders and the internal code do not come along.

Whether you copy from the list or from the edit screen, you land straight on the edit screen of the copy. In the list you would not see it: the list only shows active products by default, and the copy is inactive.

Typing everything in again is the way a VAT rate ends up wrong one day. Copy, adjust the name and the amount, and then set the copy to active.

Common mistakes

Filling in the VAT rate as a decimal. You type 0.21 instead of 21. The field asks for a percentage, and you get the message: fill in a percentage, 6 or 21 for instance.

Creating a product and forgetting to attach a price to it. The Online price column then says no price, and the product is not in your shop. Open it and add an online price.

Overwriting last year's price. Set an end date and create a new row. If you have done it anyway, your existing orders keep showing the right amount — the damage stays limited to your price history.

Creating a separate product for every price. Adult online and Adult at the desk are not two products but one product with two prices. Two products means two counters, and then you will not know at the end of the day how many adults were inside.

Setting a product to inactive and thinking the tickets sold lapse. Inactive only means: no longer on sale. What has already been sold stays valid and is simply scanned at the door.

What if …

What if my product is not in the ticket shop?

Work through these four things, in this order:

1. Is the Active tick switched on?
2. Does it have a price for the Online channel?
3. Is that price within its validity — is Valid from not in the future and Valid up to and including not in the past?
4. If it is an event, is the date today or later? An event whose day has passed disappears from the shop by itself.

In nine cases out of ten it is number two.

What if I have deleted a price by accident?

Create a new row with the same channel and the same amount. Orders that have already been made stand apart from the price row: they carry their own copy of the amount and do not change along with it.

What if I sell in a currency other than the euro?

The currency sits on your organisation, not on the product, and you set it once under Settings → Organisation, in the Currency field.

What if I want to throw a product away?

You can, with Delete at the top of the edit screen or with the tick boxes in the list. It only works for a product for which nothing has ever been sold, and that product's time slots disappear along with it. If the product already has sales, the button is disabled and says why; in the list, deleting skips such products and reports how many were left in place. For anything that has ever been sold, switch Active off. You then keep your history, and last year's orders keep pointing at a product that still exists.

Frequently asked questions

Can one product have two prices at the same time? Yes, but for different channels or different periods. 12 euros online and 14 euros at the desk is normal. Two online prices that are valid at the same time is a mistake you do not spot straight away.

Do I have to create a separate product for every rate? For every audience yes: adult, child, student. For every channel no: those are prices within the same product.

What happens with a price of zero euros? It simply works. The visitor goes through the same order, gets the same confirmation and the same scannable ticket, but no payment is involved. Handy for a members' meeting or an open day.

Why is the price not simply on the product itself? Because a price field on the product would give the impression that you may overwrite it just like that. A price hangs on a channel and on a period, and that is why it lives in a list of its own.

I filled in my VAT rate wrongly and sales have already been made. What now? Adjust the rate on the product for the sales still to come. The orders that already exist keep the old rate — that is deliberate. Discuss with your accountant what needs to happen with those orders.