How to see subscription income alongside ticket sales

The short answer

When some people buy single tickets and others pay by subscription, report the two separately and then add them up. Ticket sales are what each ticket sold for. Subscription income is the plan payments received, by the day each was paid. Their total is what your events brought in.

On One Ticket, Reports shows Subscriptions and Total beside your ticket Sales once anyone has paid for a subscription, and Sales over time splits each bar into tickets and subscriptions.

Why ticket sales alone undercount

A subscriber doesn’t buy a ticket each week. Their card is charged on a cycle, and each session’s ticket is issued to them at no charge. So if you only look at ticket sales, a class with ten casuals and twenty subscribers looks like a class of ten.

That leads to bad calls: dropping a session that’s actually your steadiest earner, pricing casual tickets against the wrong numbers, or thinking a month was quiet when your regulars paid as usual.

Count subscription money by the day it was paid

A monthly payment doesn’t belong to any one session. Trying to spread it across the sessions it covers sounds precise, but it changes every time someone joins, pauses or leaves mid-month, and nobody can check it against the bank.

The simpler rule, and the one that matches your payouts, is to count each subscription payment on the day it was paid. Then:

• Ticket sales answer “how did the casual tickets go?”
• Subscription income answers “what did regulars pay this period?”
• The total answers “what came in?”

Keep booking fees the buyer paid out of both, so the figures are what you keep, not what the customer paid.

What to look at each month

Once you can see both lines, a few questions are worth asking every month:

• Is subscription income steady? It should barely move from month to month. A drop usually means people pausing or leaving, and is worth a look at who.
• Are casual tickets growing? Casuals are tomorrow’s subscribers. If single tickets are flat, your new-people pipeline is too.
• What share is each? If nearly everything comes from subscriptions, check there’s still an easy way in for first-timers. If almost nothing does, regulars may not know the option exists.
• Did a price change land? Existing subscribers usually keep their price, so a rise shows in new subscriptions first.

Matching it to your payouts

Ticket money and subscription payments both land in the same payment account, so your bank won’t separate them for you. Counting subscription payments on the day each was paid is what lets the two lines add up to what arrived. If a figure doesn’t match, check three things first: refunds, booking fees (which shouldn’t be in either figure if the buyer paid them), and the period’s start and end, as a payment made late on the last day can fall either side depending on your time zone.

Don’t double count

If your spreadsheet has an order row for every subscriber’s free session ticket and also a row for each plan payment, it’s easy to count people twice or money twice. Keep the session tickets for attendance (who came) and the plan payments for money (what they paid). One Ticket’s reports do this for you: subscribers' session tickets are issued at no charge, so they never add to sales, and their payments count once, under Subscriptions.

On One Ticket

1. Choose Reports and pick a period.
2. Once any subscription to one of your series has been paid, two more figures appear beside Sales:

• Subscriptions: the payments received in the period, by the day each was paid, after the booking fee, with how many payments there were. A quiet period says “No payments in this period”.
• Total: sales and subscriptions together, with the split underneath, tickets then subscriptions.

1. In Sales over time, each bar has a tickets part and a subscriptions part, with a key. Choose Day, Week or Month.
2. Choose Export CSV beside the chart for a spreadsheet with Subscriptions and Total columns beside the ticket figures.

Subscriptions is always by the day each payment was made, whichever way you choose to count ticket sales. Every period, the chart and its CSV are on every plan, including Free. See the Reports guide.

Subscriptions themselves cost you nothing extra: the subscriber pays a small booking fee on each payment, as on a ticket, and you receive your full price. See pricing and the Subscriptions page.

To see who is paying, open Orders and the Subscriptions tab: each subscriber’s plan, price, status and next billing date, with estimated Gross per month at the top. See Subscribers.

Related reading

Subscriptions on One Ticket are part of a bigger setup for events that repeat: start with the complete guide to selling tickets for recurring events, or how recurring ticket sales work for billing, places and cancelling. If a payment doesn’t arrive, what happens when a subscriber’s payment fails explains what you’ll see.