Close an Event With Report and Certificates

The last guest leaves, the stage is dismantled and everyone assumes the event is over. It is not. The sponsor wants a results summary, the committee wants to know what it cost, and sixty attendees are waiting for the certificate they were promised. Doing those jobs from memory a week later is how numbers drift and names get misspelled. Event Report Generator walks you through the wrap-up in four steps on the same project you planned with: Profit statement, Guest summary, Closure report and Certificates.

The short version: put attendance and the last payments into the project first, then run the four steps in order. The order matters, because each step reads data the previous ones depend on.

Before step one: get the project back

The shared project lives in your browser tab and is erased when the tab closes. If you saved it during planning, the first move on closing day is Open project at the bottom of the page and choosing that file. Nothing is stored on a server, so there is nothing to "log in and retrieve". If you did not save, the wrap-up has nothing to work from, and the steps will say so.

Then update the project with what actually happened:

• In Guest List Tracker, change each guest who showed up to Attended. This is the single most important edit. Until guests are marked, the closure report says "Attendance has not been marked yet", and certificates for "confirmed and attended" guests include people who never arrived.
• Enter the last invoices and refunds as expenses. The profit statement is a snapshot of whatever the project holds.
• Tick off finished items in Event Checklist Planner. Open tasks are listed in the report, so leaving them untouched makes a finished event look unfinished.

Press Try a sample on a spare tab if you want to see the four steps with data first. The sample offsite has no attended guests, which is a handy way to see what the report says when attendance was never marked.

What each step does

1. Profit statement opens Event Profit Ledger: income and costs by category, planned amounts beside the costs, profit, margin, tax inside the amounts and per-head figures. Check the heads box here, because the closure report reuses the same count of confirmed and attended guests with plus-ones.

2. Guest summary opens Dietary and Access Summary. After the event it is a quick audit: how many people had food or access needs, so you can compare against what the caterer and venue were told and note it for next time.

3. Closure report opens Event Closure Report Maker. It assembles overview, attendance, programme, finance, open tasks and vendors from the project, and adds your own notes under Highlights, What went wrong, Lessons and recommendations and Thanks. Tick or untick the six sections, preview the text, copy it for an email or download the PDF. The full walk-through is in write an event closure report PDF.

4. Certificates opens Certificate Maker. Choose confirmed and attended guests, everyone except declined, every guest, or a typed list of up to 500 names. Wording takes the placeholders {name}, {event} and {date}. You can add up to two signers and download one PDF for printing or a ZIP with one file per person for emailing. The preview shows the first certificate, and a note appears if the event name is empty or a name appears twice. The details are in make attendance certificates for event guests.

A worked example: Monday after a gala

A club runs a Saturday evening gala for 140 invited guests. On Monday the organiser opens the saved project, then sets 112 guests to Attended in the guest list. Nine stay Confirmed, eleven never replied, six declined and two were on the waitlist. Fourteen of the confirmed or attended guests brought a plus-one.

Step one shows income $31,600, costs $24,350 against $26,000 planned and a profit of $7,250, or 22.9 percent. Step two counts 135 people to feed or count, which is 121 confirmed or attended guests plus 14 plus-ones. In step three the report states attendance as 93 percent of those expected, meaning 112 of 121, and lists the one open task, the thank-you notes. Step four prints 112 certificates for the people who came, as one ZIP, and none for the nine who did not.

Without the Monday edit, those nine and the 112 would all have been "confirmed", and the attendance line would have said nothing at all.

Steps

1. Open the saved project. Mark attendance in the guest list, enter the last expenses and tick finished tasks.
2. Open Event Report Generator. Work through Profit statement and confirm the heads and the planned amounts.
3. Move to Guest summary. Read the counts and keep the PDF if you want a record of needs served.
4. Move to Closure report. Fill the venue and organiser, choose sections, write three or four lines each for highlights, problems and lessons, and download the PDF.
5. Move to Certificates. Choose confirmed and attended, write the wording, preview the first certificate and download.
6. Save the project again. It is the record of the whole event.

Event Report Generator is a Premium Application, with 2 trial uses a day before a day pass or plan applies. Each export inside a step counts as one usage; copying text does not.

Common mistakes

Skipping the attendance edit and letting certificates go to no-shows. Writing lessons a month later, when the details are gone; write them the same week in plain lines, one per line. Treating the report as a legal or tax filing: the finance section is a summary of what you entered, and the tax lines are information only. Forgetting that entries in other currencies are not counted, which the report flags with the amounts left out. Sending the guest summary with allergy names to people who do not serve food; counts are enough for most readers.

Summary

Reopen the project, mark who came, finish the money, then run the four steps in order: statement, guest summary, report, certificates. Event Report Generator keeps all four on the same data, so the report, the statement and the certificates agree. More tools for before and during the event are under event tools.

Open Event Report Generator→

What does your sponsor ask for after an event that a closure report does not cover yet? Tell us on the contact page.