Eddytales Backstage

<p>The website was only half the job. The team also had to run it every day, and without a tool of their own that meant:</p><ul><li><strong>Waiting on a developer</strong> to change a price, publish a story, add a play or refund an order.</li><li><strong>No view of the box office.</strong> Sales, revenue and who had bought were hard to see in one place.</li><li><strong>Slow, error-prone entry at the door,</strong> with no quick way to confirm a ticket was real and had not been used.</li><li><strong>Scattered messages.</strong> Enquiries, feedback and payment alerts arrived in different places and were easy to miss.</li><li><strong>No safe way to roll out fixes</strong> to the machines the team uses, so an app could be left running old versions.</li></ul>

<p>We built Backstage as a <strong>focused desktop tool</strong>, laid out the way the team thinks about their work, in the Eddytales colours:</p><ul><li><strong>Dashboard and insights</strong> for a daily view of sales, audience and performance.</li><li><strong>Ticket Setup, Tickets and Revenue:</strong> every play's ticket types, prices and capacity, the orders behind them, and refunds approved by the right people.</li><li><span style="color: #c2410c"><strong>A door scanner</strong></span> that verifies a ticket in a moment, with the camera or a USB barcode scanner, and marks it as used.</li><li><strong>Content tools</strong> for stories, plays and performances, the course, audience, feedback and enquiries, with images uploaded straight to Cloudinary.</li><li><strong>Notifications</strong> on the desktop for new payments and enquiries, with counts in the sidebar.</li><li><strong>Self-updating releases:</strong> signed installers for Windows and macOS are built automatically, and the app checks for a new version every 30 minutes and updates itself, waiting if someone is in the middle of editing.</li></ul>

<p><strong>The Eddytales team now runs the website and the box office themselves,</strong> from one app:</p><ul><li>Prices, plays, stories and settings are changed in Backstage and <strong>show on the website</strong> without a developer.</li><li><strong>Door staff</strong> check tickets in quickly and can tell at once if one has already been used.</li><li>Sales, revenue and audience are <strong>visible at a glance</strong>, and refunds follow an approval step.</li><li>New enquiries and payments <strong>reach the team as they happen</strong>.</li><li>Every installed copy <strong>stays current</strong>, so a fix released today reaches the team's machines within about half an hour.</li></ul>