How Digital Ticketing Helps School Bookkeepers

Bookkeepers love digital ticketing! With automated reconciliation and accurate reporting, digital ticketing saves bookkeepers hours of time - a much-improved process since the days (and late nights) of cash reconciliation after athletic events and other school activities.

Bookkeepers are responsible for financial accounting at schools, processing records and documents, and the appropriate staff training. Most bookkeepers wear many hats and must manage several projects simultaneously under tight deadlines. It’s a challenging role that requires patience, analytical skills, attention to detail, and the ability to multitask.

Both public and private schools rely on bookkeepers to account for all money that comes into the school and the money that goes out to pay expenses. It’s a massive responsibility with serious consequences when these processes are not handled correctly.

With traditional paper ticketing, bookkeepers and event staff often have to monitor cashboxes, count cash, and physically transport large amounts of money to make deposits. Along with creating security concerns, the logistics involved with cash payments can be time-consuming and prone to errors, even for the most diligent staff members.

In addition to managing cash processes for paper tickets, bookkeepers typically coordinate the design, printing, and distribution of tickets to points of sale. This requires even more planning and administrative work, especially with multiple events to manage across campus throughout the school year.

Thousands of schools nationwide have realized the shortcomings of paper tickets and cash payments for events. With digital ticketing, bookkeepers can easily balance all school events with a single platform for ticket sales, reconciliation, and reporting.

The Big 3: How Digital Ticketing Helps Bookkeepers

There are three key processes that digital ticketing streamlines for bookkeepers.

Process 1: Presales and Planning

Ticket presales help drive engagement with the student body and community at large, and presales help bookkeepers manage event staff, promotions, and security before the event happens. Presales help with planning!

Here’s how it works. With presales, bookkeepers can offer discounted ticket prices and introduce pricing strategies like early-bird specials. This helps get the word out because people love a deal and will talk about it. Selling tickets in advance can also provide more insight to bookkeepers and school administration for staffing and security needs. With presales reports, bookkeepers can confidently answer questions about expected crowd projections and allocate expenses accordingly.

If the bookkeeper sees that ticket presales are high and the event could potentially sell out, he or she could work with event personnel to adjust staffing and notify fans of the limited number of tickets still available. On the other hand, if the bookkeeper notices that ticket presales are lower than expected, then the school has an opportunity to promote the event and offer additional incentives to drive attendance. This knowledge is powerful and can help schools be more proactive when managing events.

To learn best practices for event presales and promotion, read this post: 4 Steps to Promote High School Events and Drive Attendance.

Process 2: Event Reconciliation

Event reconciliation is dramatically faster and more accurate with digital ticketing. When ticket sales and payments are handled with cash sales, the reconciliation process for one event can take hours or even days. 

There are often thousands of ticket sales per event, resulting in significant revenue for schools. With cash sales, someone must physically count the cash to ensure it matches the number of tickets sold. Oftentimes, this has to be done two or three times to ensure accuracy. Once the cash has been counted and verified, someone must transport it safely for deposit. This is yet another step in an already tedious process, and it creates security concerns that can be easily avoided with digital payments.

With digital ticketing and payments, bookkeepers can reconcile events with just a few clicks. Rather than counting cash and ticket stubs, bookkeepers can simply view the event summary report, compare it to the payment statements, and close out the books. Reports and payment statements can be easily downloaded and saved for records.

To hear about how fast the reconciliation process is with digital ticketing, watch our conversation with Bobbi Madsen, CFO of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF): Interview with CIF: Benefits of Digital Ticketing for Reconciliation

Process 3: Audits

Public and private schools, state associations, leagues, and nearly every other organization supporting school events conduct audits to examine and evaluate internal control processes, risk management, governance, and operations. This can be a grueling process for the organization, as all revenue and expenses must be documented and accounted for clearly.

In a cash-based environment, a successful audit requires impeccable notetaking to specify the source of all funds. Schools typically must provide a breakdown of ticket revenue for every event hosted on campus. Even fantastically run organizations can struggle to manage this level of detail consistently. 

With digital ticketing, every ticket transaction is accounted for instantly. Bookkeepers and other event staff get automated ticketing reports and payment statements. They can also access these documents via the ticketing platform or pull custom data from the ticketing platform. Additionally, they can specify the precise date range of events to include in reports based on audit requirements. The ease of reporting saves significant amounts of time, ensures accuracy and transparency, and provides peace of mind during the audit process.

To take a deeper dive into this topic, check out this post: 6 Ways Digital Ticketing Can Improve Audits for High Schools.

Next Steps

With digital ticketing, bookkeepers can accelerate ticket sales, reconciliation, and reporting. To learn more about how your school finance team can benefit from digital ticketing, contact us to schedule a 15-minute overview.