Vouchers

This is a brief overview of the Voucher system now available in Theater Toolkit. This article will give you some details on what it is and how it works.

Voucher Setup

The Voucher System is a core feature of Theater Toolkit and is available to you now. There are some minor setup items needed to enable the feature:

• What you would like the name of the voucher as the customer would see it.
• A $0 Voucher Concession Item needs to be added to the POS. We need the exact name for each concession item entered. Often this is something like Customer Service Voucher. This is for internal reference purposes and matching to the POS.
• The default value you want for each voucher type. You may want some voucher types to cover a whole ticket cost and others, only a portion of the cost.
• If you want a description to give greater detail in reporting, that can be added.
• If you want the voucher type to cover the cost of the customer service fee or not.

Because we offset the price of the tickets when processing the order, you will see the concession item(s) added to the order which will tell you a voucher was used. This is an excellent way to help with reporting from the POS side outside using the data we capture for voucher usage.

Voucher Redemption

When vouchers are created, they have a max value set, but we do not show the user this value. Instead the voucher is good for a single ticket. This allows you to establish the voucher amount to be applied. When the voucher is used, the system will select the most expensive ticket in the order under the voucher max value, and discount that ticket to $0. If there are not tickets under the max value, then the max value is applied to the order and the user is asked to pay the difference. This allows the user to “buy up” a voucher for a purchase when needed and the ticket price becomes the voucher value when they are below.
For example:

1. Let’s say your normal tickets cost $10, but you have a Tuesday special for $5. A user buys a normal $10 ticket and has a voucher called “Free Ticket” that you have a max value set to $11. The user applies the voucher to the order they see the $10 ticket is paid with the voucher, and they pay the remaining $1.50 convenience fee.
2. Let say your normal tickets cost $10, but you have Tuesday specials for $5. A user buys a Tuesday $5 ticket and has a voucher called “Free Ticket” that you have a max value set to $11. The user applies the voucher to the order they see the $5 ticket is paid with the voucher, and they pay the remaining $1.50 convenience fee.
3. Now let’s say the user wants to buy a $10 ticket, but they have a “matinee voucher” that has a max value set to $5. This time the user applies the voucher to the order they see the $5 was reduced on the order, and they are asked to pay the remaining $6.50 (the remaining $5 on the ticket and the $1.50 convenience fee).

The above examples all had the convenience fees not included, but you have the option of including the convenience fee in the voucher or not. When the voucher covers the entire ticket and convenience fee, the user is prompted for their name, and email address, but we don’t require any other payment information. The theater toolkit platform will only prompt for additional payment info when additional cash payment is due.

To use a voucher at checkout, customers will see a “Passes and Cinema Tickets” option for payment. This will be listed along with the credit card and gift card payment options.

When selected, the user is prompted to enter a voucher number. The voucher is validated and applied to the order.

• You can also provide the customer a link to the website with a ?voucher= parameter that when seen we store the voucher for the customer visit and notify them it is available in the checkout process automatically. We are working on other ways of automatically loading and notifying the user, but this method should make it super simple for them to be used when coming from an email or a QR code. The URL for this would be something like: https://www.website.com/?voucher=123456
• The Theater Toolkit platform has a QR code generator that can be used to provide users with an encoded QR for vouchers. This generated is used for the confirmation codes on the ticket receipts. This is available at: https://www.website.com/theater/ConfirmationCode?value=[voucherCodeValueGoesHere] To use this you can pass the full URL into the QR code, but it has to be encoded [i.e. use %3A for “:”, %2F for “/”, %3F for “?”, and %3D for “=”] for it to work. An example URL for getting a QR code for the above example would be: https://www.website.com/theater/ConfirmationCode?value=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yourwebsite.com%3Fvoucher%3Dvoucher=123456 where the 123456 should be replaced with the actual voucher code.
• Users can also redeem vouchers in person. We have a voucher redeem page your managers can use to scan a voucher to see if it is valid, and mark it as redeemed while they manually process the ticket purchase directly through your POS. See Redeem Vouchers section below for more details.

Voucher Management

Access to the voucher management system can be found here: manage.theatertoolkit.com

There are 3 screens in the voucher management section.

Redeem Voucher

This screen can be used in theater for employees to redeem vouchers that customers bring in person. A voucher can be scanned or entered manually. An error will be shown if the voucher could not be found or has been otherwise redeemed.

If a valid, unredeemed voucher is entered, the system will mark the voucher as redeemed so that it cannot be used again.

Issue Voucher

This screen allows a user to issue new vouchers directly a customer. You can enter a customer’s email, dollar value of the vouchers, number of vouchers (limited to 10 for performance reasons), whether the vouchers will cover the service fee, whether the vouchers will expire in 6 months, and a reason for the voucher can be entered as well.

When a set of vouchers are issued to a customer, they will be sent an email with auto-generated