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Good day, my wife and I are new theatre owners in Canada. We reopened a local theatre in July '21 that closed at the beginning of COVID. The learning curve has been steep as we do this in addition to our day jobs. To my question... what POS systems and management software are you using? Do you have online ticket sales? Is your system PC or tablet based? DO online ticket sales mean you must have assigned seating? Thanks for any help.
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There are several POS systems on the market. The most popular seem to be RTS (Ready Theatre Systems) and Sensible Cinema Software. There are others, but those are the two that seem to get the most discussion here. We use RTS and have been using it for about 20 years. We use it for tickets and concessions, and they also built our mobile app. We built our own website.
We are a single screen. We DO have online ticket sales. You don't have to have reserved seats to sell tickets online, but people do like to pick their seats in advance to be sure of where they're sitting. Other people prefer the old "walk in and sit wherever" approach. On a busy movie, sometimes our theatre will sell out (or nearly so) before we open the doors. It is quite nice to get an idea of how busy we're going to be before we open. The number of online sales are affected by the audience too -- if a movie "skews old," there will be fewer online sales. What we do is, if there are no reserved seats sold when we open, we just tell people to sit wherever they want to. This seems to work well.
For computers, we are all PC based. Our concession machine is an all-in-one unit, and the boxoffice machine is a regular desktop PC. One thing to make sure of is getting computers with touch screens. Our office machine has two -- one facing the customer so they can pick their seats. Touchscreens are pretty much essential for ticket and concession sales, although you can use the mouse in a pinch. We use a cheap HP laser printer to do boxoffice reports on (I've been toying with the idea of making them into PDFs and just storing them on a hard drive but I'm wary of making some goof and losing everything.
For other bookkeeping, we use Quickbooks. I've used that for at least 20 years too, maybe closer to 30. I have another business (an auto parts store, my day job) so I use the Quickbooks for both. I do my bookwork for the theater in the office of the store since our office space at the theater is really limited.
You'll find an enormous wealth of knowledge here on Film-Tech, so go ahead and ask any question you want, anything from projection to sound to management and anything else related to the business. -
Being in Canada Omni Term and Vista are the two main players. There is a new one coming out of Quebec that I have heard good things about and we have had good luck with Sensible Cinema but the issue is with American pos systems handling credit debit with Canadian BanksComment
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