How Matchbox helps to make holidays more restful

The customer

With more than 100,000 visitors in each performance season, «Bühnen Bern» forms an important cultural institution that offers interested audience members a comprehensive palette of theatre, musical theatre, dance and concerts.

The challenge

In November 2018, «Bühnen Bern» expanded its in-house offering to include its own café. As far as the accounting processes were concerned, however, this mostly meant one thing: hundreds of additional payments needed to be reliably entered each month, over and above the payments taking place at the box-offices in connection with theatre productions and concerts. As tasks go, this would push any accounting team to its limits.

The solution

The Matchbox software imports data from the various card processors, converts them into a common format and automatically draws up accounting records for the accounting system – in this case, Abacus. By minimising the effort needed to make accounting entries manually, this system of automated entry not only frees up a great many resources, but the software also generates significantly fewer sources of error.

The modular structure of Matchbox means that «Bühnen Bern», as a relatively small cultural institution, can deliberately choose to use only some of the Matchbox functionality. Because there is not currently a need for automated payment reconciliation or payment data analysis, the software only automates the creation of posting entries. As a result, the costs for using Matchbox are also limited to this component.

The result

Claudia Ettel, the accounts controller at «Bühnen-Bern», describes the benefits that the software provides as follows: «As an accounts controller, Matchbox has been a great help to me. Previously, the large number of payments pushed me to my limits, especially whenever I went away on holiday. The mere prospect of all of those payments piling up that would need entering once I got back often caused me a certain amount of stress while I was still away on holiday! Thanks to Matchbox, things are now completely different. Nowadays, I know that I will be able to get everything back under control again in just a short time, even if I’m away from the office for a week.»