BORIS - Box Office Reservation & Information System
It's hard to believe how things were in the mid 80's. I found myself working for a London based accountancy practice during my gap year from University. The firm had a niche client base of various entertainment and television celebrities along with a selection of audit clients consisting of west end theatres. It was during the audit of one of these in that I was first exposed to what went on behind the scenes when Joe public wanted to buy a ticket for a performance. Bear in mind that, at this time, Ticketmaster was just taking off and had just started moving into electronic ticketing. I seem to remember having to phone the box office to reserve tickets for later collection and payment, or having to actually go to the box office and speak to someone, write a cheque or hand over hard cash in order to get my ticket. Credit cards didn't really exist at that time.
Anyhow, it was all done as follows (to the best of my memory)
1. There were huge sheets of paper showing the layout of the theatre and all the seats available for sale grouped into areas. Each show had it's individual seat prices. The box office staff had sheets for every performance that they were selling. Group prices and discounts were all manual.
2. The big advantage of going to the box office itself to buy a ticket was that you could see the location of the seat you were buying, something that is now pretty much standard when you book online today.
3. When a seat was sold it was marked off on the plan, and ticket removed from the relevant ticket book, the stub was hand written with details of the customer and the price. The ticket was placed in an envelope for collection or posted if the customer had an account with the theatre.
4. These theatre maps and ticket books were then passed to the accounts department after the show had been performed, the seats and prices were all manually added up and entered onto the ledgers by hand. There were no spreadsheets or computers in those days. I can't recall how the credit customers were dealt with. Maybe it was via the old Kalamazoo manual accounting system
5. There must have been some way of reconciling the cash received by performance but I don't recall.
In order to audit the theatre revenue we did the usual high level controls review but, inevitably, there was an element of substantive "tick and bash". As audit juniors we were given a list of performances to check and were despatched down to the archive rooms to retrieve the relevant theatre maps and ticket books. It was just then a case of checking all the seat sales back to the ticket stubs, checking for unsold tickets and manually recalculating the the revenue for the performance. We must have checked some form of associated paperwork for the authorisation of the "free" and "guest" tickets plus any discounted prices - maybe it was part of the FOH manager's duties and there were separate records which we could check.
Anyhow, that was how it was done until BORIS came into existence and the the preceding manual processes were replicated and programmed into the first computerised box office reservation systems. I think BORIS was used at the Sadlers Well theatre and if my memory serves me correctly, it was run on equipment supplied by IBM. All I can remember is this room with a couple of huge cabinet sized machines which had these large circular disk boxes being changed at various times - the boxes reminded me of school dinner plates with those aluminium plate separators inserted between the plates. In those days the computers screens (VDU's) were rudimentary but did display the seating plan and the status of each seat. When the seat was sold, the system recorded the sale information and price and passed all this data into some form of database. The VDU's must have been set to display certain sections at a time as they would not have been large enough to show the entire seating plan. All of the manual processes of adding up the seat sales by prices was "computerised" and reports generated to record the revenue. How we audited this, I again don't recall. I'm sure that these embryonic systems were not 100% reliable and there must have been a method of continuing the sales process when the system crashed (Probably the paper based system that existed before the computer system). The dissertation I wrote on these systems is somewhere in a box in the loft and I need to dig it out as I'm sure there were other systems coming to the market at the time. I've searched the internet for other articles researching the first dawn of computerised box office systems but it's pretty sparse and mainly relates to the airline industry.