The online sales pages are also used by Box office staff – meaning that all the functionality available in the box office can also be made available online.

All deals, discounts and membership benefits are calculated automatically, so customers don't have to call the box office in order to access the correct prices.

All shows have search engine friendly URLs, to maximise the chances your customers will find the correct information using a search engine.

Having the same sales pages used by staff and customers keeps them straightforward – so training requirements are minimal, reducing the impact of box office staff turnover.

Flexible elements can be put together to build your database exactly how you want it: no need to fill in screen after screen of fields and checkboxes and configuration elements.

Default configuration elements can be overridden as needed, at any level, eradicating confusing drop down lists full of seldom-used options.

The simplicity of the sales and setup screens minimise training costs.

E-ticketing is built in, also minimising the need for ticket stock as well as printing and postage costs.

Monad Ticketing is a fully web based system: no software to install or upgrade, so less work for in house IT.

Innovative use of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform means new servers can be started in response to busy periods, and then stopped when not required, getting rid of much of the hassle around large on-sales.

Low per ticket fee: No up-front investment required.

The whole system has been designed around online sales and e-ticketing from the ground up. The online sales interface allows ticket buyers to see what’s on, to search for shows by any text associated with them, and to browse through your content in a way that’s clear and accessible.

The seating plan is pure HTML and does not require any Java or Flash or other plugin. Having entered the number of seats required, the customer can use the seat plan to specify where they would like to sit, and the system allocates them the best nearby seats whilst enforcing business rules such as “not leaving a single seat at the end of a row”. Fiddly operations such as lassoing seats and clicking on them individually are avoided.

Customers can log into their profile to view their purchase history and change their addresses, phone numbers, marketing preferences and so on.

Unlike systems where the box office staff use a different application to sell tickets, with Monad the online sales screens are used by box office staff too – which means that the online sales functionality can never lag behind.

All discounts – 3 for 2 offers, membership, promotional codes, etc. – are automatically calculated, so there is no need to make people telephone the box office to get the best price.

You can choose which shows are visible and on sale online, which shows are visible and on sale to box office staff, etc., with a high degree of granularity. Just because it’s possible to sell everything online doesn’t mean you have to if you don’t want to.

The system allows short cuts to be created to shows, individual performances, venues, spaces, or any other container, allowing you to promote them on the front page of the website whilst keeping the structure intact.

The online sales interface complies with W3C AA accessibility guidelines

The online sales interface is built around a structure that makes it just as easy for search engines to index shows as it is for customers to browse through them. All URLs are SEO friendly with descriptive text and no id numbers in the links, and can be linked into from other sites and content management systems.

Box Office Staff Members use the same web pages as the public online sales interface to sell tickets. If you log in as a staff member you gain access to extra options allowing you to specify who you are selling tickets to, but apart from that the sales process is unchanged. The public sales process should always be as simple, quick and smooth as possible: why give your box office staff anything less?

As the sales interface is the same as the public online sales, next-to-no training is required for box office staff.

All information about a customer – name, email address, postal address, etc. – is indexed, and a single simple search box allows you to search for customers with instant results. No more tabbing through dozens of fields, trying to enter a fragment of information in the postcode field and another fragment in the surname.

As well as looking up customers and viewing their order history, staff members have access to both quick and advanced order searches to find orders for collection by credit card number, order reference, purchase date, and other fields.

Staff members can cancel tickets through a quick and simple process. Cancelled tickets are returned to the basket so that the order can be amended and rebooked if necessary. The value of cancelled tickets is returned to the customer’s account, where it can be used to purchase replacement tickets. Refunding an amount from the customer’s account to their credit card or other payment method is a separate process with separate security rules.

Setting up venues, spaces, shows and performances is quick and easy. The seat plan editor allows you to select, move and arrange seats with ease, all within the browser.

Seating plans can easily be applied to multiple performances using a template, and one-off edits can then be made to add, remove or block out seats as required.

The system does not force you to use the traditional hierarchy in which you must create a venue containing shows containperformances. The structure is based on folders, which can be tagged as venues, spaces, shows and performances as required, can contain any kind of element, and can be dragged around and rearranged. A show that is on tour, for example, might have a top level folder tagged as a show, which contains folders that are tagged as both venues and performances for each night of the tour in a different city. Temporary spaces can similarly be configured without permanently clogging up the database forever after.

Because of the flexible folder structure, any folder can contain any configuration element. Rather than having a fixed requirement that, for example, seating plan layouts are attached to spaces, a seating plan could be used by a single show, and not get in the way in future. Standard discounts can be set up that apply system wide – such as “children are always 50% off” or “students are £5 off” – and applied to performances, but discounts can also be set up to override these for individual performances, or shows.

Marketing Lists are set up by adding or removing the results of customer searches. Marketing Lists can be combined with an intuitive drag and drop interface. Marketing lists are stored in the database and can easily be used for reporting and analysis, or exported for mailshots and further analysis.

The reporting system can produce reports as interactive web pages, spread sheets, and PDF and Word documents.

Customer editable marketing preferences such as mailing list membership are built into the marketing lists.

All changes to the database can be audited and logged, and search by the system administrator.

User access levels can be configured based on the roles that user performs in the organisation.

If are dealing with hard ticket stock, the serial numbers can be stored in the database and displayed to staff when stock is picked, so that any discrepancies and missing tickets can be noted.

The system is entirely web based, so no installation on box office PCs is required, minimising support and setup costs and IT overhead.

The system is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and so can easily scale up adding extra servers to handle certain events, and then remove those servers again when not required.

A simple, transparent per ticket fee means no large up-front investment to get up and running, and no risk that lower than expected ticket sales will leave you out of pocket.

A standard package of website integration, data conversion, consultancy, training and configuration are all covered by the per ticket fee. Requirements in excess of the standard package may be chargeable.

Technical support from 9am to 9pm is included in the per ticket fee. Upgrades to newer versions of the system are also included, and can either be applied automatically, or individually.

By minimising staff training costs and the hardware and IT overhead of hosting and managing your own system, the total cost of operating Monad Ticketing is astonishingly low.