How to build a business case for your event?
To monitor the budget of your wedding, (corporate) event or festival, our event software is the right choice. In 'Budgets' you put all the costs of your event and they automatically adjust when you change the number of guests. Do you also have a revenue stream such as ticket sales? Then you can add it to complete your business case.
If you want to use our event budget planner, first create an event (if you haven't already). This is how you work:
Create an event
You can create a Budget sheet for every event you organise. You do this directly from the budgets page, which is also accessible via the 'event software' link in the header of our website (if you are logged in).
Add costs or revenue to your event
Click on the 'Add budget line' button to add a new cost or revenue to your budget file. Enter your data in the pop-up:
- Category: select a category in which the cost or revenue fits. For drink and food costs, for example, you choose the category 'catering'. This way you can neatly put all costs together per category.
- Cost/Revenue: Indicate whether the line is a cost or revenue.
- Description: a short description of the cost or revenue.
- Supplier: here you can enter the supplier or event venue you work with. When you start typing, a list of suppliers we know on our platform will appear. Click the event company name in the list. Is your supplier not in the list? Then just type the name without making a selection.
- Fixed price: here you enter the fixed price that you pay to a supplier. For example $ 2500 rent for the event location.
- Unit price: do you pay an amount per person? By tent? Then you can enter the unit price here. For example $ 50 per person for the caterer.
- # units: This field indicates the number of units by which the tool multiplies the unit price. By default, the tool takes the number of people you have set in your event's settings. This is super handy, because if you adjust the number of people, the tool automatically corrects all budget rows that work with this number. However, sometimes you want to work with a different number, such as if not everyone is participating in the dinner. In that case, tick the checkbox 'Manually adjust # units'. This way you can adjust the number of units yourself. Please note, if those numbers change, you will have to adjust this field yourself. This does not happen automatically.
- VAT percentage: This field is only available in 'advanced' mode for corporate events. You enter all prices excluding VAT and enter the VAT percentage of the budget line in this field. The tool then calculates the totals including and excluding VAT. Do you have a supplier who uses two or more VAT percentages on the quotation? Then create two or more budget lines.
Change/delete budget lines
You can change a line by clicking on it. You can then edit and save all fields or delete the line with the 'delete' button.
Advanced mode: VAT
Our software assumes that all prices you enter include VAT. That is perfectly fine for weddings, private events, etc. If you are organising a professional event for your company, you want to be able to see the VAT split. Via the settings of your event you can activate the checkbox 'Work with prices ex. VAT in budgets'. If you do that, an extra field will appear when you add or change budget lines where you enter the VAT percentage. You then enter all prices excluding VAT and our tool calculates the VAT for you.
Attention:
- If you later switch from a simple view without VAT calculations to the advanced mode, you must check all the budget lines entered previously (i.e. adjust the prices to exclude VAT and enter the correct VAT percentages).
- Once you switch to advanced mode, it is no longer possible to revert the event to standard mode.
Budget versions
You can also create multiple versions of your budget. If you are working on a business case for a festival, you may want to create a realistic, optimistic and worst-case scenario. Other organisers, on the other hand, like to keep track of versions of their budgets: the version of your pitch and then versions with different adjustments. From now on everything is possible.
This is how you create versions
You can create a new version of your budget by clicking on the version name at the top left. Click the 'create new version' link in the dropdown that appears. You can start from a blank sheet or from a copy of the active budget and build on that. You can easily switch between the different versions via the same dropdown.