How to Know If Your Show Made Money

The reconciliation problem

Here is how most post-show accounting works for independent promoters. The show happens on Saturday. On Sunday you transfer the door cash to your account. On Monday the Eventbrite payout lands — minus fees you forgot to calculate. On Tuesday you get an invoice from the venue for the bar minimum you owed. By Thursday you have a rough idea of whether you made money. By the time you've actually reconciled everything, you've already confirmed the next show.

This isn't a discipline problem. It's a systems problem. Most promoters don't have a single place where all the numbers live together — so the post-show P&L becomes a forensic exercise rather than a live dashboard.

What to track before the show happens

A proper event P&L starts at planning, not at settlement. Before a ticket goes on sale, you should know your cost floor — the minimum you need to cover regardless of attendance. This includes:

• Artist fee (guarantee) — the amount you owe the headliner no matter how many tickets sell
• Venue hire or minimum spend — what you pay the venue regardless of bar revenue
• Production costs — PA hire, lighting, stage management if applicable
• Marketing spend — paid social, print, any promotional costs
• Ticketing platform fees — typically 3–6% of face value plus a fixed fee per ticket

Once you have your cost floor, you can calculate your breakeven: the number of tickets you need to sell at each price tier to cover costs. This is not a nice-to-have. It's the number you should know before you confirm the show.

The platform fee problem

One of the most consistent sources of post-show confusion is ticketing platform fees. Eventbrite (and similar platforms) charges a percentage plus a fixed amount per ticket. On a €20 ticket, you might receive €17.80 after fees. On a €40 ticket, you receive €36.60. These are not identical percentages — they're a hybrid fee structure that means your effective margin per ticket type is different.

The correct way to calculate ticket revenue for P&L purposes is:

If you calculate revenue before deducting the platform fee, you will consistently overstate your gross and understate your costs.

Additional revenue lines

Most shows have revenue beyond ticket sales. Bar splits, merchandise commissions, sponsorship placements, and coat check splits are all real income that belongs in your P&L. The problem is these often arrive days or weeks after the show — a bar split reconciliation might come as a bank transfer two weeks later with no reference number.

Build a habit of recording expected additional revenue at planning time, and marking it actual when the money arrives. This gives you a projected P&L before the show and an actual P&L after, with the gap clearly visible.

What net profit actually means

Net profit is not "money in the account minus what you remember spending." It is:

A show where you received €3,200 in ticket revenue but paid €1,800 in artist fees, €600 in venue hire, €200 in PA, and €150 in ticketing fees left you with €450 net profit. That same show "felt" like a success because the door was busy. The P&L tells you whether it actually was.

The case for doing this in software

None of the above is complicated maths. The problem is doing it consistently, for every show, with data that's up to date. Spreadsheets work for one show. For a promoter running 10–30 shows a year, the friction of maintaining separate spreadsheets per show, manually importing ticketing data, and reconciling everything at the end of the month is what causes most promoters to simply not do it.

A tool like Eventyca keeps all of this in one place: costs entered as you incur them, ticket data updated as you import it, platform fees deducted automatically. After every show, your P&L is there — no reconciliation required.