Box office software built around the online sale

The phrase covers three jobs that used to be three products:

• Inventory and pricing. Halls, seats, screenings, ticket types, pricing rules, holds and comps.
• Selling. At the counter, on a kiosk, on the website and in the apps — against one shared inventory, in real time.
• Reporting. What sold, through which channel, at which price, to whom, and what it settled to.

A cinema gets into trouble when those three live in different systems. Two selling channels against two inventories produce oversells; two pricing tables produce a refund queue; two reporting systems produce a number nobody trusts.

Filmgrail solves this by not duplicating the inventory. It reads and writes your existing box office through its API, and owns the part most counter-first systems do worst: the online sale.

Vendors use the three names for the same job: a box office management system holds halls, seats, screenings and pricing; a box office ticketing system sells and issues the tickets; online box office software is the part that sells on the web and in the app. Buyers searching for any of them usually need all three to share one inventory.

The market splits into four groups, and most disappointment comes from buying from the wrong group rather than from buying a bad product:

Names you will meet while researching include Vista and its independent-focused product Veezi, POSitive, RTS and Omniterm on the cinema side, and Spektrix and Ticketsolve on the performing-arts side. The Boxoffice Company sells an online layer that integrates with several of the cinema systems. Filmgrail sits in the fourth group: it provides the digital ticketing layer and integrates with whatever runs your counter.

A cultural centre running film four nights a week and live performance the rest often needs a performing-arts system, not a cinema one. A six-screen independent usually does not need an enterprise platform. Getting the segment right removes most of the shortlist.

Selling

1. What is the mobile conversion rate across your customer base? If the vendor cannot answer, they are not measuring the thing that matters most. Over two thirds of cinema traffic is a phone.
2. Can I complete a booking without creating an account? A forced registration step before payment is the most expensive single design decision in cinema ticketing.
3. Show me the seat map on a real phone. Pinch, pan, select an accessible seat, change your mind.
4. How many taps from the homepage to a completed purchase? Count them yourself during the demo.

Control

5. Can my own staff change a price, add a ticket type or run a promotion? If any of those is a support ticket, you will stop doing them.
6. What can be configured per hall and per screening rather than per site? Premium formats and event cinema depend on it.
7. How do refunds, exchanges and comps work? Ask to see the flow, not the feature bullet.

Data and integration

8. Is there a documented API you can read and write against? See the documentation before signature.
9. Who owns the customer data, and can I export it in full? Get the answer in the contract.
10. Which showtime aggregators do you supply, and how often? This decides whether your showtimes appear correctly on Google.
11. What happens to my data if I leave? Export format, notice period, and whether historical transactions come with you.

Then run the evaluation the practical way: write down your constraints (screens, sites, country, hardware, live events), shortlist three vendors by segment, demo with your own programme rather than the vendor's sample data, buy a ticket yourself on a phone on each shortlisted system, and get the three-year total in writing including payment processing and exit terms. With Filmgrail you can skip the sample data entirely: build a working prototype of your own cinema in 20 seconds.

Platform fees and per-ticket fees are the visible part. The costs that decide the real total are usually elsewhere:

• Payment processing, sometimes bundled and sometimes not; over a year of volume the difference is often larger than the licence.
• Migration of seat inventory, memberships, gift card balances and reporting history.
• Integrations to loyalty, accounting or data partners, often quoted one by one.
• Change requests: anything your staff cannot do themselves becomes billable forever.
• Training: a system that takes two days to learn is expensive in a business with seasonal staff.

"Free" box office software usually means a booking fee charged to your customer, a tier you will outgrow, or an unsupported open-source project. A customer-facing booking fee still comes out of your conversion rate and your attendance.

Filmgrail costs a flat $200 to $20,000 a year depending on screens, with no per-ticket fee and no share of sales. See pricing.