There are two main system concepts for dealing with sales and returns in Spektrix. These are transactions and orders. 

Transactions

Put simply, transactions are an audit or record of sales and returns that take place within your system. These could be as a result of a customer purchasing a ticket on your website, a donation your fundraising team has entered into Spektrix, or a reservation made by your Box Office Team. 

Every sale or return that takes place in your Spektrix system creates a transaction to keep a record of what happened in that sale or return. 

Contained within a transaction are:

• Items, such as tickets, memberships, donations or merchandise
• Payments, such as card, cash or Custom Payment Types
• Commissions, such as delivery costs, ticket commissions or transaction commissions

There's also additional data that is captured in a transaction, such as:

• Accounting date 
• Transaction date
• User who processed the transaction
• Sales Channel (e.g. Web, Phone or Counter)

Orders

Orders are containers for transactions that are linked together using a unique Order Id. Each order normally only contains one transaction but some can contain many transactions, depending on how much the order has been edited. 

Orders also contain additional information such as:

• Customer information
• Order Attributes
• Reservation timeouts
• Questionnaire answers

Examples

Let’s say a customer has purchased a ticket at your box office. In this example, we have a single transaction within its parent order. In this case, the customer has only made one transaction within the order, indicating that no edits have been made to that order. Here’s a diagram of how these concepts are nested within each other:

Here you can see how this would appear within Spektrix:

When a customer makes a reservation with you and later purchases those tickets, their order will contain two transactions.

The first transaction shows that the customer made a reservation for two tickets over the phone. In the later transaction within the same order, the reservations are returned and the tickets are added to the transaction, paid for and confirmed at the counter. At a glance, you're able to see exactly what has happened to the reservations and tickets, and a clear audit is kept for you. As before, here’s a diagram of how these two transactions exist within one order:

And here’s how these two transactions would appear within the order in Spektrix:

Similarly, when a customer purchases and then later returns tickets, this will occur as two transactions in the same order. The first transaction contains the initial ticket purchase, and the second transaction has the return.

As before, here’s a diagram of how these two transactions exist within one order:

And here is how that appears within Spektrix:

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If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Support, Training and Consultancy team.