How to setup your "External Vouchers"

Where do I find it?

Sales channels > Partner management > External Vouchers

Sales channels > External vouchers

What does it mean?

External vouchers are a great option to benefit from a partnership without the burden for the partner to use our Boxoffice application. Sometimes they can be useful to allow transactions of services with big partners, who already have existing processes that can’t be influenced. Palisis is able to tailor and handle five different forms of external vouchers depending on your and your partners’ needs.

There are five types of vouchers which can be characterized in two different groups:

External Vouchers which are limited in numbers. These are:

• Numeric: These vouchers are very simple in design. Their code is just a number that identifies the number of the voucher itself. You should be careful not to assign the same numbers to two different partners (use different ranges for different partners) or use the D1 type of voucher.
• D1: These vouchers work very similar to the numeric ones but the generated codes are more complex. Such codes are less prone to a mix-up between partners and are more secure against fraud.

External Vouchers which are unlimited in numbers:

• D2: Option D2 creates a single code string that can be put in front of a partner's coded information. The two strings can be put together and transformed into a single bar or QR code. This way the code is able to relay information to you as well to your partner.
• D3: Option D3 creates a code that can be printed separately on a voucher that identifies you and your product. This can be very helpful if a number of sales agents are dealing with various vouchers.
• D4: Option D4 creates a single code string and the second part of the code will be variable. You can use this type to assign certain vouchers to specific agents and identify them.
• Wildcard: At times partners might be unwilling to change their processes and thereby their existing product codes. The option of wildcard vouchers allows you to generate placeholders in the system. Now if a wildcard voucher is redeemed, the Palisis system saves the foreign code and thereby secures against its repeated use. The pattern is an advanced setting that allows you to define a pattern of voucher codes you are able to redeem. This is especially useful when your partner has already printed the vouchers, but you are only willing to redeem some of them, the ones which match the pattern. It's also possible to have more than one pattern for the same partner. Please, contact support@palisis.com if you are interested in using this feature.

You can also assign identifiers to each of the external voucher batches, regardless of the type selected, so they will be redeemed into a specified price plan, passenger category and seat category. In our example, we have assigned the voucher numbers going from 10000 to 10050 (50 units) to a "24 hours" hop on hop off adult price plan for the seat category English.

The identifiers can be assigned for NUMERIC, D1, D2, D3, D4 or WILDCARD vouchers.

What should I do?

If you have a contracted agreement with Palisis about the use of partners, the “Partnering” module gets unlocked. Now if you reached an agreement with your partner about the use of external vouchers, you might configure the permissions and pricing. For more information, please visit the following articles:

How to set up"Partner Permission"?

How to set up "Partner Pricing"?

Then go to Sales channel > Partner management > External voucher or Sales channel > External Voucher and click on the specific partner.

You can click on the 'Create external voucher' button to create a new external voucher.

In the 'Globals' tab you can choose the type of voucher you’d like to generate (D1, D2, D3, D4, NUMERIC or WILDCARD). If you want to create a limited number of vouchers you should use the options NUMERIC or, even better, D1. Depending on the number of vouchers you want to hand out you must add a range of numbers (i.e.: From 1 > To 1000 equals 1000 vouchers). If you don’t want to limit the number of vouchers you should choose D2, D3 or WILDCARD.

Next, go to the 'Identifiers' tab if you want to limit the product/services a voucher refers to. Choose the number of tickets per voucher, Product, Price, Passenger and Seat category and click on '+ Add ticket to list'. Finally, press “Create” to complete the process.

Back in the External Vouchers page you should now see the new voucher. You now have the possibility to “invalidate”, check the “assigned identifiers” or “Download” an excel file with a list of the created vouchers.

In this Excel file, you’ll see three different rows: VoucherID, BookingID and TrackingID.  The squares under BookingID and TrackingID should only be filled in once a voucher is redeemed. 

You or your desired printing house can use the codes under VoucherID to generate bar or QR codes. A very simple way to do this yourself is by opening up the site https://duckduckgo.com/ and entering “QR” as well as the generated voucher code. Press enter and your printable QR code gets generated.