Reporting and Invoicing for Agencies

Jessica Abejar
Jessica Abejar
  • Updated

In this article we will cover reporting and invoicing for Agencies. Whether you sell tickets through an agent offline or through the API, when someone buys a Ticket, payments will be made to the Agent. You will need to invoice the Agent to collect the funds and settle this payment outside of Spektrix. Before reading, make sure you are familiar with the following articles, as well as the articles corresponding to how you work with your Agents:

 

In this article, we will cover:

 

Invoicing Agents

When it comes to reconciling Agent sales, you’ll require an invoice to send to the Agents. There is a Custom Formatted Report available for this purpose. To have this Report added to your system you’ll need to request the Agent Invoice Report from our team.

The Agent Sales Invoice can be customized with your logo and branding, organization address, and payment terms. Here’s an example:

A sample Agent Sales Invoice Report.

This Report outputs a page (PDF) or sheet (Excel) per Agent with each line breaking down Sales & Returns by Event Instance and Order ID. There is a summary of the total owed by the agent at the end of each page, as well as payment details.

These Reports can then be run over a date range with an invoice generated for each Agent’s Customer ID. The report uses either Customer Attributes or Tags to identify and filter transaction data only from Agents so you will need to set these before running the report.

 

Setting Up an Agent Customer Attributes or Tags

You can choose to identify Agent Customer Records with either Customer Attributes, Tags, or both. To work with the Invoice above, we recommend setting either Attributes or a Tag Group as “Agency.” For Attribute type, we recommend using a dropdown. The values or individual tags will be the names of the Agencies.
For more information on setting up Customer Attributes or Tags, take a look at Creating Attributes or Setting Up Normal Tags.

 

Running the Agent Sales Invoice Report

The Custom Agent Invoice Report comes with the following Criteria Sets:

  • Agent Attributes and Date Transaction Confirmed: Filtering Tickets purchased during the indicated time period by Agents with the selected “Agency” Attributes
  • Agent Tag and Event: Filtering Tickets purchased for the Event selected by Agents with the selected “Agency” Tags
  • Agent Customer ID, By Event, Date Transaction Confirmed: Filtering Tickets purchased during the indicated time period for the Event selected by an Agent who matches the exact Customer ID inputted

You are also able to create any custom Criteria Sets. As a formatted Custom Report you can run the report as a PDF or formatted Excel as well as other unformatted file types.

TIP: You can set up a Report Schedule to automatically generate this Report as often as you need. Using the Agent ID Criteria Set, you can even set a Reporting Schedule for individual Agent accounts.

 

Reading and Understanding the Agent Sales Invoice Report

The Agent Sales Invoice Report outputs a page (PDF) or sheet (Excel) per Agent. Each line includes a breakdown of Sales & Returns grouped by Event Instance and Order ID.

A sample of the Agent Sales Invoice report with sales and returns.

 

The Report shows:

  • Value of tickets sold or returned: The original price of the Ticket
  • Inside commission rates: The assigned Agent discount rate
  • Inside commission value: The calculated value of the Agent discount
  • Chargeable value to the Agent: The amount charged/owed to your organization, equal to the Net Value minus Inside Commission Value
  • Summary of the total tickets sold: The total number and value of the total tickets sold including the total value of the agent discount and other taxes and fees
  • Summary of the total owed: The total amount charged/owed to your organization from sales made by this agent during the time period specified the Criteria Set

 

REMINDER: Agent Sales are the only items where the Total Charged against a Ticket Sale can be less than the Price. The Total Charged is the amount charged to the Agent. The Price of the Ticket is the value of the tickets before the Agent Commission is applied.
For example, an agent can sell a $50 Ticket and earn a 10% inside commission. The Total Charged is $45 as the agent has earned $5 from the 10% inside commission while the Price of the Ticket is $50.

 

Reporting Agent Payments

After you have invoiced your Agents and received your payments, it is up to your organization to decide whether or not you would like to record the money received in your Spektrix system.

It is not necessary to reconcile the payments as once sales are confirmed in your Spektrix system, they are marked for the Event for which Tickets have been purchased. Agency API sales will be recorded as Agent Payments while Agency Offline sales will be recorded as their respective payment type such as a custom payment type.

You can choose to indicate when payments have been made to your bank by including information in an Order Note, creating and editing Order Attributes or changing the Accounting Date to reflect when payment was received. These data fields can also be outputted in Custom Reports, if needed.

 

Agency Sales in Payments & Activities Report

The Payments and Activities Report is an Accounting Report that shows all payments received over a given period. The Report is broken down by Activities and summarized for the specified time period.

By using the Payments & Activities Report, you can take a look at how much value in Tickets have been sold or returned by Agents during that given time period.

REMINDER: The Payments and Activities Report is best used for financial reporting. For a Report that shows the amount owed by individual Agents over an event or date range, take a look at the Agent Sales Invoice Report.

 

Payments By Type

How Agency Sales and Returns appear in the Payments by Type section of the Payments & Activities Report will depend on how you are working with Agents.

A sample output of the Payments and Activities report showing the Payments by Type section. This section includes Agency Invoice and Agency Invoice Refund as Payment Types and a separate section called API Agents with Agency Sales.

 

Events Activities

The Payments & Activities Report (detailed) includes further information about the payment methods used for Ticket Sales. Sales through the API will appear under the Agency column. Manual agent orders or Agency Offline sales will be recorded as their respective payment type such as a custom payment type.

A sample of the Payments and Activities (detailed) report showing the Activities Breakdown section. The section shows a column for Agency payments.

The Ticket Price recorded for Agency sales will be the Ticket Price minus the Agent Inside Commission. The total value in the Agency column should match the Agency Sales row in the Payments by Type section.

 

Further Reading

For further reading on Agencies and reports, please take a look at the following articles: