11.32.0 Release
Production Release Date: Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Platforms: Backoffice (B2B), Online Checkout (B2C), ACME Sales (POS)*, Access Control (AC)*, Payments
Release Type: Minor
Downtime: None
Test Environments: Sandbox 10, POS Sandbox 11.32.0, AC Sandbox 11.32.0
*POS Application valid through 10/01/2024 and AC Application valid through 11/14/2024
Membership Program Enhancements
Membership Notes
Have you found yourself wanting to inform your front desk staff of important information about a member when they arrive at POS to obtain their tickets or update/renew their membership? Important information such as:
- A note to confirm some information: "Please confirm the name of a caregiver or nanny (who is not a cardholder) associated with the membership."
- Special notes from a development officer: "Please notify Jane Smith when this member arrives at the venue."
- Notes from the membership office: "Please confirm this member's address, mail has been returned!"
- VIP notes to improve customer service: "This member has been supporting us for 20 years!"
- Red Flag notes about past member behavior: "The member has a history of being difficult, habitually asks for membership extensions, and has abused their privileges in the past." (My goodness!)
We are happy to inform you that membership notes have arrived to both ACME Sales (POS) and Backoffice (B2B)! Here's how they work:
- If you have permission to edit memberships (MEMBERSHIP_UPDATE), you can write up 2000 characters worth of important information about a member at both POS and Backoffice.
- These notes will be visible on the membership details at both POS and Backoffice. In the case where there is a long note, staff can click to view the full details.
- When running a Membership report, you can now include the field "MembershipNotes" as one of your columns to report on.
| ACME Sales (POS) | Backoffice (B2B) |
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As you begin to use this new feature, please let your CSM know if you have any feedback they can share with our design and engineering teams. We will continue to enhance membership notes in upcoming releases and always appreciate your feedback. Of note, we are currently working on an enhancement to automatically carry membership notes over to the new term when members renew, upgrade, or downgrade their membership. This is coming your way in the new year.
Member Checkout | Pre-fill Member Information
We love improving the user experience, especially when it comes to a faster and easier checkout experience for members. Now when a member purchases tickets or gift memberships, we will save both them and your staff time by prefilling their information where we can. Christmas came early this year!
Online Checkout (B2C)
- When a verified member purchases tickets or gives a donation, we will prefill the payment information section with the primary cardholder's name, email, phone number, and address.
- When a verified member gifts a membership, we will prefill their information as the gift giver.
ACME Sales (POS)
- When selling a gift membership to a member, agents will find a new check box on the screen to prefill the primary cardholder's information as the gift giver.
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On both B2C and POS, the member or agent can change the prefilled information as needed. This information will be saved with the order so you can get it from Order Details and Reporting. As always, do note that any edits will not automatically update the customer record. We are working on further improving this experience at POS in the new year to enable your staff to choose to update the customer record for a member during the checkout process.
Online Checkout (B2C) | Checkout with Multiple Gift Memberships
As the holiday gift giving season is upon us, we gave a makeover to the user experience when a guest or member on B2C adds multiple gift memberships to their cart. Gifters will find the flow much more intuitive and easy to navigate, hopefully encouraging them to gift even more memberships this holiday season!
| Original Experience | Simplified Experience |
 |  Less is more! Now a simple "Continue to Membership" call to action guides the gift giver to each additional membership they are gifting. |
Additional Enhancements
Backoffice (B2B) | Customer Edit
In our 11.28.0 Release we added the ability to manage customers in Backoffice. In the spirit of continued improvements, we now bring you the ability to add an address to a customer if there is not one saved for them yet. We've also improved the experience to keep the address modal open while editing, so even if you accidentally tap outside, you'll no longer lose your edits. Sometimes it's the little things in life that make all the difference!
Backoffice (B2B) | Ticket Analytics and Sale Reports for Items Purchased
Continuing on the work we started in the 11.30.0 Release to facilitate joining reports via additional IDs, we added "Order Item ID" to both the Ticket Analytics and Sale reporting sets. This will enable you to join reports with Transactions, which has the corresponding ID for all items purchased (e.g. Adult tickets, Senior tickets, Family Membership, etc.). Please note: This field will be populated in Ticket Analytics and Sale reports for all orders going forward.
Backoffice (B2B) | Membership Report for Auto Renew Subscriptions
"Does anybody really know what time it is?
(Care about time) does anybody really care?
If so, I can't imagine why..."
Well, Chicago, you may not care... but we need to, which is why we fixed a time zone issue on the "Subscription Updated Date" field in Membership Reporting. The field will now show correctly in your tenant's time zone. Does anybody really know what (subscription updated) time it is? ACME Membership Reports do!
Backoffice (B2B) | Auto Renew Order Confirmation Email
The Order Confirmation email for Auto Renew Membership purchases contains important legal text that must be sent to the member. When an Auto Renew membership is purchased via Backoffice, we now ensure that the email is always sent to the member by removing any temptation for you or staff to select "Do not send email confirmations" for the Order Confirmation Email. We figure the holiday season has enough temptations already!
Backoffice (B2B) & ACME Sales (POS) | External CRM Integrations
You know what they say when you assume... Well, our terminology made it look like we assumed that your external CRM integration was either Salesforce or Raiser's Edge. We recognize that isn't always true, so in Backoffice and POS we renamed references to "Raiser's Edge" to "External CRM".
Optimizations
ACME Sales (POS) and Access Control (AC) | Apple iOS Certificates
We are updating the Apple iOS certificates for the ACME Sales POS and Access Control applications to keep them running on iOS devices. We do this to stay in compliance with Apple development requirements.
ACME Sales (POS) | Card Reader Connection
If your local area network (LAN) is experiencing issues which causes ACME Sales to go offline for a span of time, the card reader may lose connection to the app. Once back online, if the card reader had disconnected, it required the agent to manually reconnect by tapping "Reconnect to Reader" in the side menu.
We were thrilled to see that with TriPOS Mobile SDK version 3.0.2 (which we upgraded to in the 11.30.0 Release), the SDK now supports us making calls to automatically reconnect the card reader. So you bet your bottom dollar we wanted to improve this for you! Here are the improvements your staff will now benefit from:
- The new SDK will automatically try to reconnect once it detects the card reader, so we no longer need to make a call to initialize reconnection. Your staff will no longer need to wait for a spinner with the message “Chip Card Reader Initializing" - those days are gone!
- Additionally, your staff will only need to manually reconnect in the case where it does not automatically reconnect in under 1 minute and 40 seconds. That is a long time to wait for a connection, so in practice, we could see this happening if the card reader was recently turned on and still powering up when an agent logs into POS.
- And finally, we've added a "Dismiss" button on the toast (message window) that displays at the bottom of the screen as a card reader connects. While the toast will automatically go away once connection completes, if for some reason it does not, the agent can now dismiss it.
Bug Fixes
ACME Sales (POS) | The Case of the Missing Ticket Types
A few of you reported that certain ticket types were intermittently absent when selecting roll-up tiles. While we could never reproduce, we know you all are not going crazy! So our engineering team took a look at the code and improved how we cache information when you are moving back and forth between screens. You should be good to go now, but certainly let us know if any disappearing acts still happen.
ACME Sales (POS) & Access Control (AC) | Ticket Check-in
If an Event was configured to stop ticket sales before the event start time, then the event was MIA on the will call list at Access Control and on POS Order Management, which prevented scanning and checking in tickets for that event. To support all your check in and scanning needs, events configured this way will remain visible from now on.
ACME Sales (POS) & Online Checkout (B2C) | Purchase Availability Rules
We received reports that all purchase availability rules for General Admission events and rules for Standard events to stop sales once the event starts were not being honored at POS or B2C. Sooo what's the point of having configuration options if they don't work?! Well, we fixed it for ya! So now your purchase availability configurations will correctly determine whether or not an event can be sold.
Online Checkout (B2C) | Memberships in the Cart
We discovered a sneaky B2C bug if someone added a membership item and a membership gift item to a cart, but then removed the first item. The remaining item in the cart duplicated itself and neither version could be removed from the cart. We know that you all want to increase your membership sales... but perhaps this isn't the best way. We fixed the bug so now items in the cart will no longer duplicate after another one is removed.
ACME Sales (POS) | Tile Design
Our POS Tiles inadvertently received a bad makeover during our 11.28.0 release, which caused them to lose the formatting that made them so easy to read. The tiles are now back to their best selves, complete with bolded titles and text wrapping, so your agents can easily identify items to sell.
ACME Sales (POS) | Card Reader Configuration
You know the well-known saying "you can't run before you can walk". But do you know the lesser known saying "you can't disconnect a card reader before it's ready to disconnect"? Your agents might have, so we've improved things:
- If an agent logged into ACME Sales and then quickly attempted to disconnect the card reader while the app was initializing a connection, the app may have crashed. We have added safeguards in our code that wait until the TriPOS SDK is ready before allowing a POS user to select the "Disconnect" button on the reader. Rest assured, they won't need to wait long.
- In another scenario, if the card reader was either off or not nearby when logging in, and the agent tapped disconnect while the app was looking for the reader, the message at the bottom persisted as if it was still trying to connect to the reader. It wasn't, so we kindly told it to go away.
Backoffice (B2B) | Membership Conversion Orders
Here's a fun, easy riddle for you (answer at the bottom):
- I sometimes come in a can but I'm not food.
- I sometimes come in a bottle but I'm not a beverage.
- I come in different colors but I'm not a rainbow.
- I'm sometimes used with canvas but I'm not a tent.
- I'm used with a brush but I'm not toothpaste.
Here's a less fun, head scratcher riddle for you:
Look at the data in the Transaction report for orders containing membership conversions and figure out what happened. You could have spent all day trying to figure it out! We are happy to report that we have corrected it, so now it's a no-brainer.
For converted tickets, we exchange the full price ticket for a $0 ticket and apply that money to the membership purchase. For accurate reporting on these converted tickets, you will now see:
- The original ticket(s) will have a negative quantity on the RefundSale and RefundAdjustment transactions.
- The new $0 tickets will appear with a Sale transaction and a quantity equal to the number of tickets that were converted.
Should you need assistance with these reports, reach out to our support team!
Answer to above riddle: Paint!
Backoffice (B2B) | Refund with a Membership Lifecycle Action
When a refund was owed for a membership lifecycle action in Backoffice (e.g. downgrade to a lower membership level), we incorrectly prompted users to enter in a credit card. We fixed this and now will simply refund back to the customer's original payment method as expected.
Coming Soon in January 2024
Payments | Card Readers
Our team is hard at work prepping a few enhancements with card readers for upcoming releases. These include:
- A new bluetooth card reader option on the TriPOS Mobile SDK, which is great for mobile scenarios and comes in at a very affordable price point.
- Support for the TriPOS Cloud SDK, which will improve the experience for you and your staff to connect to a card reader by simply selecting from a list of configured card readers. The TriPOS Cloud SDK also enables the card readers to automatically get software and firmware updates from the cloud in off-peak hours, saving you and your staff time when upgrades become available.
New and Updated Knowledge Articles
We are continuously updating and adding new articles to our Knowledge-base in the ACME Support Portal. Below are some recently added or updated articles: