Every group sale has two dates and a policy for what happens to the deposit if the group never pays in full: a balance due date, a release date, and a deposit policy.
Balance due date vs. release date
- Balance due date — when the remaining balance is expected. Reminder emails count down to this date.
- Release date — when unpaid seats actually go back on sale. It defaults to the balance due date but can be set later, giving the group a grace period after the due date before their hold disappears. It's always required to be on or before the performance.
Setting the release date a few days after the due date is a common pattern: the reminder emails still count down to the due date, but the group gets a short grace window before the seats are actually let go.
Reminders
The group's contact gets an automatic email at each of a reminder schedule — by default 14 days, 3 days, and the day the balance is due, each sent once. A venue admin can change the venue's default schedule; the schedule can also be overridden per group sale.
Open the group sale and look at the Schedule card.
Click Send reminder now to email the contact immediately, outside the normal schedule — useful right before a deadline or when a contact says they never got the email.
Click Extend / edit policy to push the due date and/or release date out, or to change the deposit policy. Extending re-arms the whole reminder schedule against the new due date, so the group gets fresh reminders rather than none at all.
Every reminder — scheduled or sent manually — includes the amount due, the due date, the release date, and either a link to pay online (if one has been created) or the box office's contact info.
What happens to the deposit at release
If the release date arrives and the balance still isn't paid in full, the same daily job that sends reminders also releases the unpaid seats — automatically, if Auto-release at deadline is on. What happens to the deposit depends on the group sale's deposit policy:
- Keep the deposit (non-refundable) — the whole hold releases and the deposit is kept. Money collected online is recognized as revenue in the books; money the venue collected offline (cash, check, PO) was always the venue's — there's nothing to book.
- Apply to as many seats as it covers, release the rest — as many whole seats as the deposit fully pays for convert to real tickets automatically (they show up as a normal paid order and scan at check-in); the remaining seats release. Any deposit money left over — not enough to cover one more seat — is refunded.
- Refund the deposit — the whole hold releases and the whole deposit is refunded. A card deposit refunds automatically; an offline deposit (cash, check, PO) is flagged on the group sale for the venue to refund manually, since Noctern never held that cash.
A card refund happens automatically through Stripe. An offline deposit can never be refunded automatically — Noctern never received that money, so the group sale's status will say a manual refund is owed, and it's on the venue to actually send it back.
"Release hold" on the group sale detail page applies the deposit policy immediately, the same way the automatic release does — useful if a group tells you in advance they're not coming through.