Simplify event planning & management with smart ERP

Event companies almost always know their revenue per job and almost never know their cost per job. The reason is timing. The event ends on Saturday, the client is invoiced on Monday, and supplier invoices keep arriving for six more weeks. By the time the last one lands, everyone has moved on to the next three events and nobody goes back to add it up.

Booking costs against the event as they happen removes that gap. It also changes what you learn. After twenty jobs you can see which event types carry their cost and which ones the team enjoys doing at a loss.

The pattern is familiar to anyone in this business. The quote covers a hundred and eighty guests. On the day there are two hundred and ten, the client asked for a second bar at eight in the evening, and a generator was hired because the venue power failed. All three were agreed verbally by people who were busy.

None of that is unreasonable. The problem is only that it was never written down against the job. Once extras are logged as they are approved, the conversation with the client happens with a list rather than from memory, which is a different conversation.

Staging, lighting, linen, glassware, radios and cabling walk away from events. Every company in this industry knows it and very few can say how much of it, or from which jobs, because the losses only appear as purchases of new stock.

The other half is scheduling. Two events on the same Saturday need the same twelve uplighters, and finding that out on Thursday is expensive. Committing equipment to a job when it is booked makes the clash appear when it can still be solved by hiring in.

Higher value equipment is better held as a fixed asset than as stock, because it carries depreciation and a maintenance history. A moving head fixture that has been repaired four times is telling you something about whether to keep renting it out.

Event businesses run on a small permanent team and a large temporary one. That makes labour the most variable cost in the business and usually the least analysed, because permanent salaries sit in payroll and crew payments sit in expenses, and neither view shows the cost of a single job.

Supplier coordination has the same shape. Florists, caterers, AV companies and venues each invoice on their own schedule. Recording the committed cost when the order is placed, rather than when the invoice arrives, is what makes an event budget mean anything while the event is still ahead of you.

The pricing question in this industry is not what to charge. It is whether the number you have been charging has been enough. A company running conferences, weddings and product launches may be subsidising one of the three for years without anyone noticing, because the profitable line covers it.

Historical cost per event type also gives you a defensible position with clients. A client pushing on price is easier to answer when you can point at what the delivery costs rather than negotiating on instinct.

Cash timing is brutal in this business. Deposits arrive months early, supplier payments go out in the final fortnight, and the client balance settles well after the event. A company can be booked solid and unable to pay for the next job.

Two things worth stating plainly. Wizard is not a ticketing platform and it does not do seating plans or floor layouts, so if you sell tickets to public events that stays a separate tool. What Wizard covers is the money, the equipment, the suppliers and the people behind each job, which is where the margin is decided.