The box office
A box office is the desk where people who did not book online buy their way in, and where those who did come to collect.
A box office is the point at a venue where tickets are sold, collected and queried in person. It does two jobs that are easily confused: taking new money from people who turn up, and handing over tickets already paid for elsewhere. Both write into the same count of places.
Selling and collecting are two jobs
A queue at a box office is usually two queues standing in one line. One half wants to buy on the door; the other half has already paid and simply wants their tickets. Splitting them into two signs moves the whole line faster than any amount of software.
Collection has its own name in a lot of box office software, borrowed from the American trade: the will call list, meaning tickets held at the desk under the buyer's name. Whatever you call it, it needs to be searchable by surname, because that is what people offer you.
Why the numbers drift
Most drift comes from selling in two systems. The online shop knows about its own sales, and the desk keeps a paper tally for cash, and at nine o'clock nobody can say whether the hall is full. Where pantomime tickets sell by both routes across a fortnight of performances, that is a fortnight of guessing.
The other cause is the float. Cash sales at the door mean a cash box, and a cash box that nobody counted at the start cannot be reconciled at the end. The money is usually all there; what is missing is the evidence that it is.
The box office with Passavo
The box office runs in the browser on a tablet or a laptop and sells from the same time slots as the online shop, so a place sold at the desk disappears from the website immediately. Tickets bought online are found by name in the scanning app and checked in with a single tap.
Card and cash sales are recorded separately, and the takings can be closed off at the end of the night with a report you can hand to the treasurer. A volunteer can be given box office rights without gaining access to anything else.
Also searched for as
- box office system
- ticket desk
- box office software
- ticket counter
Common questions
Do we need special hardware for a box office?
No. A tablet or a laptop with a browser is enough. A receipt printer and a card terminal can be added where the volume or the venue calls for them.
Can two people sell at the same desk at once?
Yes. Several devices can sell from the same event, and each sale is recorded against the person who made it, which makes the end-of-night count easy to check.