Have you ever pondered setting up special “flavors” of your website based on the source site that referred a patron to you? How about a special version of the site for holidays, or even special shows? This is easy to do in PEO by using multiple interfaces.

On the Admin Site under Site Design, Interfaces, you will see all of your current interfaces. If you don’t mess with your site much, there’s probably only one here. To get started, highlight the interface and click the toolbar button to Copy Interface With its Screens. This will make a replica of your site to play with, and won’t break anything in your live environment. To view the site during testing, note the code number beside this interface and add a new argument to your link, like so:

http://tickets.mysite.org/public/default.asp?interface=4

One client made a Christmas edition of his site last year; several of you keep a test interface or two in order to compare possible site designs to each other. How has the multiple interface feature changed the way you run your site? Leave a message in the comments.

At the last Blackbaud Conference, one client shared an experience where several cashiers had defrauded her organization via a pretty clever scheme. For cash transactions, the cashier would sell a Member or Child ticket in PE but charge the patron a Full Price admission and then pocket the difference. Once Jeff Heffner and I heard the story, we decided to come up with some reporting ideas to help catch a thief in the act.

After some brainstorming, we created the Cashier Audit Report. It displays a breakdown of price types sold by each user and their relative percent of total. See this screenshot for an example of the report. With it, you can look for trends and see if anything weird is going on with the distribution of price types. For example, you could see that four of your cashiers sell Student tickets as about 8% of their total sales, but the fifth cashier is selling 15% of his tickets as Student. It could be completely innocent, or it could be that he is letting his friends in at a discount or taking money. Either way, you now have the information you need to take action at your fingertips.

Alyssa Wigton, our report writer in Professional Services, provided a couple of great tips and helped us get it working in PECRViewer.exe so it can be run directly from Patron Edge. To use it:

1. Download this set of files: Cashier Audit.zip
2. Add the stored procedure to your PE database
3. Add the report into Patron Edge per Knowledgebase solution BB142029

As with any custom stuff I give out on the blog, this isn’t an official piece of Patron Edge. My analysts can’t take questions on it, and I can’t be responsible if it leaves the bathroom light on, tramples your flowers, or rearranges the numbers on your speed dial!

Did you find this report helpful for preventing fraud? Are there any other reports in the system that you use on a regular basis to look out for thieves? Leave a note in the comments.

So now that you have locked down the system appropriately per my previous post on the subject, it’s time to take advantage of one of the controls in PE regarding end-of-day procedures. I am referring to the Drawer Cash Out function. If you are not familiar with this feature, it allows your cashiers to enter their end of day cash drawer totals directly into PE, so that you can view their totals side-by-side with the system totals for that drawer. Using this method is easier on the cashier, more secure, and a lot harder to fudge than a paper count-out sheet. Here is how to set up the feature:

Enable the feature in Company and for each Cash Drawer:

1. Go to Administration, System Setup, Company and select the Close Drawer tab
2. Set Manage Floating Till to Yes and click OK
3. Now to to User Setup, Cash Drawers
4. Edit each drawer and set Display Actual Payment Done to Yes

Set up the payment methods to display on the Cash Out:

1. Go to Administration, System Setup, Cash Drawer Payment Methods
2. Create a new entry for each kind of bill or coin, where the Value is relative to a dollar. For example, you will make an entry called Quarters with a value of .25
3. Create an entry for Check, Clearing and Gift Certificate, if necessary. Feel free to break this down as much as you feel comfortable; some people have one Credit Card entry, some people use one for each card type, and some don’t record this pay type at all on the Cash Out. Just stay consistent with your business practices

Disable the Close Drawer function and enable the Drawer Cash Out function in Profiles:

1. Go to Administration, User Setup, Profiles
2. Edit the needed profiles by expanding the Main Menu section, checking Drawer Cash Out, and unchecking Close Drawer

Not too difficult, right? The reason we turn off the Close Drawer is because only managers should have the ability to do this (or even run draft reports). A cashier should always be reporting her drawer totals blind.

Are you currently using the Drawer Cash Out function? Do you feel it has helped in preventing fraud or streamlined your end of day process? Leave a note in the comments.

Fraud is a problem in all types of organizations, but it can be especially tough for performing arts organizations and museums since we’re frequently dealing with temps for most of the front desk work. As consultant Leslie Bradford discussed in her Blackbaud Conference session To Catch A Thief, there are a lot of ways you can get ripped off. Since not everyone was able to make the conference, I’ve decided to do a series of posts on some things you can do to prevent fraud at your organization.
Restrict Access to the system
Every user should not have a System Administrator profile, and every user should belong to a user group. If a cashier’s only function is selling tickets, he should not have access to Administration or reports at all. Think carefully about what users need what level of permissions.

Give everyone a unique login and cash drawer
Your login should be treated as your signature. I know logins like User1, User2, User3 are a lot easier to manage than dealing with creating new logins every few months. But it becomes a lot harder to track down where the money went at the end of the day when everyone is using the same generic login.

Use secure passwords
Require a password that’s different from the login (there is a setting in Administration>Company that can enforce this). Make it have at least eight characters and consist of both letters and numbers. Most importantly, never share your password. It does no good to give everyone their own login if they can all log in as Supervisor or as each other. Be sure to change passwords at least every 90 days.

Change the Supervisor password
There are two default login/pass combinations that come with PE, depending on how long you’ve had the program. I can’t tell you how many people my analysts get onto screenshare with and see the user enter pe/1 or Supervisor/admin. If your database still uses this default, change it immediately. Ideally, only one or two people at the organization should have access to this password and if the login is used frequently then the same 90-day password rotation applies here.

Next time I will discuss using the Drawer Cash Out feature and how it helps in combating fraud at your organization. How are you handling access to the system? Leave a note in the comments.

So you’ve got a really nice site that you use for content management and you want to let patrons go directly to the PEO event seating map from your external site. Or you have your own blog and you’d like to create a Donate link that will go to a PEO donation page. Or maybe you’re sending out an email blast and want to remind users to update their name and address information with a link to the eCRM login screen. These things can all be done easily using a tool called Loader.

If you have ever tried to deep link to PEO pages from another site without using Loader you’ve noticed that the link ALWAYS takes you to default.asp, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. This is because PEO needs to create a session for you when you first hit the site. One purpose of this is to allow you to keep things in your own basket rather than letting another patron take your seats while you’re shopping. Loader creates this session for you on the fly. I’ll show you some examples below, and a short explanation of how to use it with almost any standard PEO page.

To link to the eCRM login screen, your link would look like this:

https://sales.mysite.org/public/loader.asp?target=crm_login.asp

To link to the seat map for a specific event, your link would look like this:

https://sales.mysite.org/public/loader.asp?target=hall.asp?event=xxx

where xxx is the event code from the Admin Site. That this works even if it’s a GA event; PEO will figure out where you need to go.

Now do you see how the concept works? There are a lot of other pages that use this same feature. Here’s how to unlock that functionality.

1. Browse through your site to locate the page to which you want to link
2. Open the ASP page in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and do a search for “get_form_value”. You can ignore the rest of the page for our purposes here
3. In this little piece of code, you’ll notice that there is a variable you can use when loading that page. For example, the variable in hall.asp is called “event”
4. You can now use this variable (or variables if there are more than one) along with loader.asp to get directly to the desired screen

Do you currently use PEO deep linking? Please share your experiences in the comments.

This tip isn’t for everyone, but for those of you who have an environment where your web server can talk directly to your PE database server, we can eliminate two applications called Queues and Listener and really speed up load times on your PEO site.

To do this requires PEO 3.2.5 or higher and some specific environments. If you have the web site on one box and your PEO/PE databases on a second one and they can communicate directly (using a technology called DCOM), you’re in business. Sorry, hosted PEO folks! Here are the steps to set it up

1. Stop the PEO Manager Service
2. Open your ToptixEsro2.ini file and remove Queues and Listener. Be sure to re-number the other applications because PEO Manager service needs them to be in order starting at 0
3. Edit the Sites table in your PEO database, giving it the following settings
   • stSroIP - machine name of the PE server, or leave it blank if both databases are on one box
   • stSroPort - 999
   • stSyncIP - blank
   • stSyncPort - 0
   • st_eSRO_IP - blank
   • st_eSRO_Port - 0

Now restart the PEO Manager Service and enjoy your new performance gain! Internal testing has shown improvements of up to 30% in performance on database requests, depending on the kind of request being made. You’ll notice that the seat map is particularly zippy. Say goodbye to L300 errors forever!

To update the database, just follow these simple steps:

1. Open SQL Management Studio and connect to your SQL Server instance
2. Locate your PE or PEO database, right-click and select Properties
3. On the Options tab, set the compatibility level to 90 and click OK

I’ve done a fair amount of research and it looks like 2005 has some speed increases over 2000 in certain situations; however it is disputed whether or not 2005 gives significantly better performance across the board. In any case it does allow you to take advantage of some of the new features of 2005, such as improved reporting services. Personally, I love being able to have Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer and Profiler accessible all in the same application.

Is your organization updating from SQL 2000 to 2005 in the near future or have you done so recently? What is your advice to others who are thinking about investing in an upgrade? Leave a note in the comments.