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Artist Pre-Box Tickets

Some artists want a physical batch of tickets to sell themselves. You print the tickets, hand them over, and settle the cash after the show.

Opendate handles this with a Paid with cash organizer order plus a refund on whatever comes back unsold. That keeps your ticket counts and your revenue accurate without any manual bookkeeping.

Before you start

  • Set up a dedicated hold for the artist's allotment if you want the inventory reserved ahead of time. You can also pull straight from available inventory.
  • You'll need a Boca (or other connected ticket printer) and enough stock loaded for the full batch.
  • If you're printing more than 500 tickets, plan to split the order into batches (see Step 3).

1. Create the order

  1. Open the event and go to Event Details › Tickets.
  2. Scroll down to Add Attendees.
  3. Set Order Type to Paid with cash. This records the revenue in Opendate even though the money is being collected offline.
  4. Choose the ticket type — pull from the artist's pre-box hold, or from general availability.
  5. Enter the quantity (for example, 10). The total value calculates as you go.
  6. Click Next.

2. Enter the buyer

  1. Enter the artist's actual name as the buyer. This is the best practice, at a glance you can tell which order belongs to which artist, which makes settlement much faster if you have multiple pre-boxes on one show.
  2. Do not check Send confirmation email. For a pre-box you don't want digital tickets going out, the artist is getting paper.
  3. Click Place order.

3. Print the batch

  1. Go to the Ticketing Dashboard and find the order you just created.
  2. Open it and click Print tickets.
  3. The batch prints on your connected printer.

Print a maximum of 500 tickets at a time. Very large print jobs are more likely to stall partway through — a paper jam, a dropped connection, or a printer timeout on ticket 800 of 1,000 leaves you unsure which tickets actually made it out, and reprinting the whole run wastes stock. Keeping each job at or under 500 means a failure only ever costs you one batch, and you can see at a glance whether a batch finished.

If the artist's allotment is larger than 500:

  • Create separate orders of 500 or fewer each (for example, 1,200 tickets → three orders of 400, or two of 500 plus one of 200).
  • Name them so they're distinguishable at settlement — "Sylvan Esso — Pre-Box 1 of 3," "2 of 3," and so on.
  • Print and confirm each batch before starting the next.

4. Hand off

Count the printed stack against the order quantity before it leaves your hands, and confirm the count with the artist's team. A signed or texted confirmation of the handoff count saves a lot of debate at settlement.

5. Settle after the show

  1. When the artist returns the unsold tickets, count them.
  2. Open the original order and refund those specific tickets — not the whole order. Opendate lets you select individual tickets in the refund flow.
  3. The remaining tickets stay recorded as paid-with-cash revenue, which is exactly the cash the artist should be handing you. Your books balance.

If the allotment was split across multiple orders, refund the returns against whichever order the tickets came from. Matching by ticket number keeps each order's math clean.

Tips

  • One order per artist, named for that artist. Don't combine multiple artists into one pre-box order — it makes the post-show refund a guessing game.
  • Refund the returns the same night if you can. The longer the gap, the harder it is to reconcile against the settlement.
  • A cash refund is a bookkeeping action. Because the money never moved through Opendate, you're not sending funds back to a card. Just don't forget to actually not collect for the returned stock.
  • Scanned tickets can't be returned. If a ticket was scanned at the door it's been used, and refunding it would overstate the returns. Reconcile against your scan report if the counts don't line up.

Troubleshooting

A print job stopped partway through. Check which ticket number it stopped on, then reprint only the remaining range rather than the full order. Keeping batches at 500 or under makes this range easy to identify.

The returned count is higher than what's unsold in Opendate. Confirm none of the returned tickets were already scanned in — a scanned ticket has been used and shouldn't be refunded.