Build an Event Profit and Loss Statement

The charity dinner sold out, the board is delighted, and then the treasurer asks one question: did we actually make money, and how much per seat? If the answer lives in three spreadsheets and a pile of receipts, the honest reply is "roughly". Event Profit Ledger reads the income and cost entries in your event project and builds the statement for you: income and costs by category, the planned amount beside each cost, profit and margin, the tax inside the amounts and the figures per head.

The quick version: log every payment, set a budget, open the ledger, check the head count and download the PDF or CSV. The rest of this guide shows what each number means, so you can defend it when somebody questions it.

Where the statement gets its numbers

The ledger does not have a form of its own. It reads the shared project that all the event tools work on, and that project lives in your browser tab. Three kinds of entry feed it:

• Costs and income typed into the Expense Tracker, where the Type menu switches an entry between Cost and Income. In event mode the income categories are Tickets, Sponsorship, Exhibitor fees, Merchandise, Donations, Grants and Other income.
• Receipts read in Receipt to Expense Sheet: drop photos or PDFs, check each row for date, vendor, total, tax and category, then press Add to my project.
• Planned amounts from Event Budget Planner, one line per category.

Two other buttons feed it as well. Receipt Maker has Add to project ledger as income, and Purchase Order Generator has Add to project ledger as a cost. A document keeps the same id for its number, so adding receipt R-014 twice updates the line instead of doubling it.

The project is erased when you close the tab. Use Save project at the bottom of the page to download the file and Open project to bring it back. Try a sample loads a small two-day offsite so you can see every number below move before you commit real data.

A worked example: 220-seat charity dinner

Here is the dinner the board asked about. Income: 220 tickets at $85 is $18,700, plus $6,000 of sponsorship. Costs: the venue at $6,500 before 8 percent sales tax, catering at $9,680 with the 8 percent already included, AV and production at $2,400 and marketing at $850. The plan was $7,000 venue, $9,000 catering, $2,500 AV and $1,000 marketing.

Enter the venue as an amount that excludes tax with a rate of 8, and the catering as an amount that includes tax with a rate of 8. The ledger treats the two correctly: a cost shows what you paid including tax, so the venue appears as $7,020.00 and the catering as $9,680.00.

The statement then reads:

• Total income $24,700.00 (Tickets $18,700.00, Sponsorship $6,000.00).
• Total costs $19,950.00 against $19,500.00 planned. Catering is $680 over its plan, venue $20 over, AV $100 under, marketing $150 under.
• Profit $4,750.00, which is 19.2 percent of income.
• Tax paid on costs $1,237.04. That is the tax sitting inside the gross amounts, not an extra charge.
• Per head, with 220 heads: income $112.27, cost $90.68, profit $21.59.

The per-head profit does not come from dividing the profit by 220. The tool rounds income and cost per head first and subtracts them, so the three lines always add up to the cent on the page.

Steps

1. Enter every income and cost in the project. Give each one a category and, where tax applies, a rate. Tick "Amount already includes tax" when the receipt total is what you paid.
2. Add planned amounts in Event Budget Planner. Without them the statement still works, but shows a note that no planned amounts exist.
3. Open Event Profit Ledger. The three cards at the top show Income, Costs and Profit (or Loss).
4. Look at the Heads box. Left empty, it counts guests marked confirmed or attended together with their plus-ones, and shows that number as the placeholder. Type a number to override it.
5. Read the category rows. Each cost row shows what was spent and "of ... planned" where a budget line exists.
6. Check the notices under the statement: costs in another currency are not counted, and the tool tells you how many were left out.
7. Press Copy statement for an email, Download PDF for the board pack, or Download CSV for a spreadsheet. The CSV has the columns Section, Category, Actual and Planned.
8. Save the project so the figures can be reopened.

Copying costs nothing. The PDF and CSV downloads are exports, and each one counts as one usage. Event Profit Ledger is a Premium Application, which gets 2 trial uses a day before a day pass or plan applies.

What the tool does with awkward entries

A few behaviours explain numbers that look odd at first:

• An income entry filed under a cost category such as Venue is shown as "Other income" instead of reducing your venue line. It is a filing mistake, and the statement protects you from it.
• A cost with no category appears under Uncategorised, so it still counts in the total.
• A taxed entry with no rate has no tax counted. The ledger cannot guess a rate, so add the rate to the entry. Event Tax Summary lists these entries by name.
• A budget line with no spending still shows on the cost side with 0.00 spent against its plan, which is exactly what you want when contingency was never touched.

Common mistakes

Reading the profit before the last invoices are entered. Run the statement again after the final caterer invoice and the refunds, because either can move the result more than a sponsor. Counting registrations as heads when finance means people who attended: write the definition down and keep it with the export. Leaving out comp tickets; a comped seat has a cost even though it brings no income, so record it as marketing or sponsor fulfilment. Treating the tax line as advice. The statement says it is information only, and your accountant decides what to file.

Summary

An event P&L is only as good as the entries behind it, so log income and costs with categories and tax rates, set a plan, confirm the head count and then export. Open Event Profit Ledger with your own project, or press Try a sample to see the layout first. The wider set of planning tools sits under event tools.

Open Event Profit Ledger→

Which would help your board more next: a view that ranks costs by how far they went over plan, or a side-by-side of two events? Tell us on the contact page.