event-budget

Event Budget

You model the money for one edition of a technical event. Produce five things:

• The cost lines, and which of them scale with heads.
• The revenue total, and where it comes from.
• The cushion.
• The dates cash moves.
• The cut order when revenue falls short.

Consume prices - ticket, sponsor, venue, vendor - never derive them. Hand back every number as either a dated quote or a labelled placeholder.

Treat every ranking below as a default, not a law. Re-rank against what the interview turns up: a recurring event with last edition's actuals, an organizer with no accounting capacity, a fiscal host already taking a share off the top, a format with no ticket-revenue line at all. Each overturns a default rung.

No currency amount appears anywhere in this file. The real figures - published P&Ls, revenue splits, unit costs, fee ranges - live in the references with their event, year, and source, carried across as ratios, never copied as amounts.

Ticketed or free-by-construction

The axis that changes the budget work is whether the format has a ticket-revenue line at all, never who pays for the attendee. The same catering invoice arrives whether the attendee expensed the ticket or paid it themselves, and sponsors are a business buyer in both cases.

• Ticketed - a genuine two-line revenue mix. Sponsorship share is a lever the team sets and can miss. Once sponsorship is booked, break-even is an attendee count at a price, and the downgrade ladder exists because the ticket side is uncertain.
• Free-by-construction - typically a hackathon, sometimes a conference. Sponsorship is close to the whole funding source, not by target but because the format offers no priced alternative. Break-even collapses to a fundraising target, and the only lever left is total spend per head.

Name which one the model assumes in the first line of the output. Keep the two cost taxonomies apart too: they differ in shape and must never be blended (see references/cost-taxonomies-and-sourced-benchmarks.md).

What arrives already decided

Take these as inputs. Re-deriving any of them produces a second, competing number nobody reconciles.

Sibling	Owns	You do
event-ticket-pricing	The ticket price ladder	Hand it the ticket target and the paid capacity after comps; it returns the actual sold total for variance
event-sponsor-pricing	Tier splits	Own the sponsorship-share target; it splits into tiers
event-venue-sourcing	Real quotes, terms	Hold the line-item slot, fixed/per-head character, deposit timing
event-vendor-sourcing	Every other supplier quote	Same split: it quotes, you shape
event-production	The Media line, pre-split by tier	Take it as handed
event-no-show-management	The expected-show-up number	Budget from it, never the registration count; the overbooking buffer is the gap
event-team-structure	Which entity holds the money	Model what it costs and how fast it releases funds
event-risk-management	The risk case for a reserve, go/no-go placement	You pick the contingency number
event-growth-strategy / event-portfolio-strategy	Whether the edition grows, portfolio split	Re-run this model at whatever scale they set

Hand post-edition variance to event-debrief, never re-modelling it, and hand a cost line creeping across editions to event-continuous-improvement. Plan and track one edition only.

Interview

Ask one at a time, multiple-choice where possible. Questions 6-8 exist because the menus below diverge on time-to-effect, durability and effort - their defaults cannot be picked for the user.

1. What is the format, and does it charge for attendance at all?
2. What is the expected show-up number, who produced it, and is it a show-up figure or a registration count?
3. Which cost lines already have a real dated quote? Which are still guesses?
4. Which entity holds the money, and what comes off the top (fiscal-host share, processing fees, parent contribution)?
5. What is already contractually committed, and on what date does each commitment stop being recoverable?
6. By what date must sponsor and ticket money be in the account, not invoiced? A hard date promotes postures that book early.
7. One-off edition, or one year of a recurring event? A recurring event reuses last edition's costed tiers, making the ladder near-free the second time.
8. Effort ceiling: who holds a standing tracking job through the sale window, and is there accounting capacity at all?
9. Who approves spend, and does any expenditure need a second approver who isn't the spender?
10. Does the audience typically attend on employer training budgets, and does the program already clear those budgets?
11. Does any counterparty - venue, vendor - offer a genuine discount for paying early?

Workflow

1. Run the interview. Fix the format, scale, and which funding-model decisions are already made elsewhere.
2. List cost lines from the format's own taxonomy - conference and hackathon differ in shape, never blend them: references/cost-taxonomies-and-sourced-benchmarks.md.
3. Cut every line into fixed and per-head, naming each per-head driver. Both the split and the assignment of each named line to a side are this skill's own construction, carried over from general financial modelling rather than measured against event data. Take the head count from Q2's expected-show-up figure, never the registration count: budgeting off registrations is the single most common way an event over-orders. Keep the resulting cost per head on hand; it answers a "too expensive" pricing complaint with arithmetic instead of an opinion.
4. Fill each line with a real dated quote or an explicit placeholder. Never invent a price to balance the model - write "no quote yet" and carry it as a range.
5. Deduct what comes off the top first: fiscal-host share, processing fees on both rails, required parent contribution. Fee ranges: references/cash-flow-fiscal-hosting-and-tax.md.
6. Set the revenue mix (menu below), then hand the targets out: the sponsorship target to event-sponsor-pricing; the ticket target (expenses minus sponsorship share) plus paid capacity after comps to event-ticket-pricing. Count comps from agreements actually held, never from a ratio.
7. Cost the Good/Better/Best scope-tier ladder - three fully-costed versions (Good runs at all, Better adds expected niceties, Best has real headroom), break-even computed per tier. On free-by-construction, each tier is a fundraising target instead.
8. Size the contingency using the three-tool stack below.
9. Build the cash-flow schedule: every outflow on the date it leaves, every inflow on the date it lands, then read the lowest cash point. Hand checkpoint dates to event-planning-timeline and event-risk-management.
10. Write the tax and jurisdiction question rather than answering it. Route it to the fiscal host, a local accountant, or counsel, then record the answer as a budget line.
11. Track live against the plan, validating with the user section by section.

If your harness has persistent memory, record:

• The line taxonomy, with each line's fixed/per-head character.
• The quotes, with their dates.
• The three costed tiers.
• The contingency figure, and how it was reached.
• The cash-flow schedule, with its lowest point.
• After the edition, actual against planned, per line.

The next edition starts from that record instead of a blank spreadsheet. When rewriting a recurring per-head consumable line from what was actually used, record its calibration basis too: the headcount and staff/volunteer/speaker composition it was priced against. A later edition scaling that line then knows what baseline it is adjusting, not just the raw number.

Revenue-mix posture

Which shape the funding takes. This posture is largely inherited rather than chosen here: the format and the upstream funding-model decision usually fix it. Name which one arrived, and what it implies for the model. Ranking (default, not a law - re-rank against Q1, Q6, Q7):

• effort (modelling work plus the standing revenue management each posture demands): registration-led > sponsor-led > sponsorship-by-construction

• value (budget covered without the decision to run hanging on money that arrives late): sponsor-led > sponsorship-by-construction > registration-led

• efficiency: sponsor-led > registration-led

• Sponsor-led (default for a community conference) - sponsorship carries the bulk, registrations cover per-attendee cost. Decouples "will we run at all" from the ticket curve, which makes the downgrade ladder workable.

• Registration-led - registration carries the bulk, sponsorship marginal. Tops effort - a sales pace managed across the whole window, money lands latest. Promotion condition, keyed to Q10: the audience attends on employer training budgets and the program already clears those budgets.

• Sponsorship-by-construction - free-to-attend, no ticket line, share near-total by format not target. Deliberately absent from the efficiency line: the format chooses this posture, not this skill. Cost is concentration - one revenue source, no second lever.

What this order starves: registration-led, the only posture whose revenue scales with what the audience pays rather than with sponsor budgets. Follow the default long enough and the sponsor pool becomes the event's ceiling. A community that outgrows that pool has no second lever, and this order gives no warning until the pool is exhausted. Promote registration-led on the condition above.

Delete, do not demote: sponsor-led and registration-led, on a free-to-attend event - from this menu and the axis lines. Ranking postures that assume a ticket line invites a ticket price to reappear later as the fix for a shortfall - a funding-model reversal dressed as a budget adjustment.

Three published actuals disagree almost completely - see references/cost-taxonomies-and-sourced-benchmarks.md for the range. Read them as postures that exist, never a norm to hit.

Contingency provision: a stack, not a ranking

This section deliberately does not rank its options.

The three tools compose: a real budget runs all three at once. Ranking them would imply picking one, the opposite of how the stack holds together.

Even if they were competing, a ranking would rest on nothing:

• Value and effort run in the same order across all three - floor lowest on both, ladder highest on both.
• Every pair therefore splits the two axes: each option wins one and loses the other.
• No dominance relation exists anywhere in the menu for an efficiency line to honour.

An unfalsifiable ranking is not a passed check.

• A floor - an absolute minimum cash reserve held regardless of budget size, covering the small certain surprises that always arrive (figure and source in references/cost-taxonomies-and-sourced-benchmarks.md). Cheapest of the three: one number, decided once.
• A pad on the estimates - a percentage added to expense estimates before summing, protecting against line-item underestimation rather than revenue shortfall. The one figure available for it is a convention carried over from startup financial modelling, not measured against event data. Label it that way every time it is quoted.
• A downgrade ladder - the Good/Better/Best tiers with dated checkpoints, driven by revenue actually received. The only one of the three that absorbs a whole-event shortfall rather than a line-item miss, and the most expensive: three fully-priced versions plus checkpoint dates threaded into the plan. On a recurring event (Q7) the tiers are reusable, cutting cost sharply from the second edition on.

Neither the flat floor nor the borrowed pad is an event-industry convention, and this skill will not present either as one. Say that to the user rather than producing a percentage that sounds authoritative.

The cut order lives inside the ladder

The cut order is the ladder's content - the tiers are this sequence, pre-priced and pre-decided. Not a second menu: presenting it separately would ship the same decision twice. Not ranked either: both readings of it (damage avoided per cut, how late the cut can be made) produce the identical order, so a ranking line would only restate it.

Each rung rests on a sourced mechanic: the scope-tier ladder behind the tiers, the attrition exposure behind the fixed lines. The order they sit in is this skill's own construction, not an observed convention.

1. Discretionary extras first - the evening event, swag upgrades, sponsored add-ons. This is the Best tier's own content, and cutting it protects the core experience entirely.
2. Per-head variable quantities second - catering covers, badge and lanyard counts - only where the guarantee hasn't locked yet. Past the lock date this rung is gone, which is why the cut order must be decided against the cash-flow schedule, not in the abstract.
3. Fixed structural lines last - the venue tier, the core Media line. These commit earliest and can cost more to cut than to keep. Attrition thresholds and food-and-beverage minimums are owed on what was committed, not on what turned up, so a downgrade can produce a penalty larger than the saving.

Outflow commitment posture

How the budget commits money against revenue not yet banked - the liquidity ques

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