Break-even, and how a show is selling

Two readings sit on a booked date's page, and both disappear the moment you settle it: what the night has to take before it stops costing you money, and — on a ticketed night — where the tickets are against your own comparable shows.

They are there for the window where you can still do something. Once the night is counted you know what actually happened, and a projection sitting next to the real figures is at best noise and at worst read as a second opinion about the same night.

Only you see either of them. Both are built from your staff pay and your own takings, so a booking agent working your calendar gets neither — not hidden on the page, but never fetched at all.

What this night has to take

The fixed cost of the evening — the shifts you have rostered, anything else you have recorded against the date, every flat fee on the bill and every house tab — and then what the crowd has to spend to cover it.

It is a fact about the evening rather than about one booking, so a three-act bill gets one figure. There is one door, one set of shifts and one set of costs; charging each act the whole night's staffing would tell you the same night cost you three times over.

• Break-even door — what has to come in on admission.
• Paying in — the same figure in people, at your own headline ticket price.
• Once they drink — fewer people, because it credits each head with the bar and kitchen spend of a night here with nobody on stage.
• The room draws — what you get on an ordinary night anyway, so you can see whether the act has to fill the place or only turn up.

A share of the door is not a fixed cost, so it is solved for rather than added on: you keep what is left after the percentage, which means the bigger the split, the further past your costs the door has to get. That trade is the thing you are actually agreeing to and it appears nowhere else in the app.

Splits on one bill adding up to a hundred per cent or more can never break even, and it says so in those words. The acts' share grows with every ticket sold, so no crowd closes the gap — printing a headcount there would be a number you could only reach by arguing with arithmetic.

On a no-cover night there is no admission to divide by, so it gives you what the bar and kitchen have to do instead. It does not appear on a night with nobody on stage, on a date nothing is booked into yet, or on a private hire — the host covers the room whatever it does, so there is no crowd to break even against.

When the figure is a floor

• Nobody rostered on the date yet, which is usually the case weeks out. The cost of running the room in people is simply not in the figures until the shifts exist, and the panel says so — add them and the break-even will rise, often steeply. This is the one most worth watching, because it is the state the panel is most often read in.
• An hourly shift with no hours entered cannot be priced, so everything shown is a floor until you fill them in.
• An act with no deal agreed yet has no fee in it. That is still the useful number — it is what the night costs before you offer anybody anything, which is what it can carry.

With no nights of your own with nobody on stage that month, there is no “once they drink” figure and no “the room draws”, and the panel says so. That is the honest answer rather than a zero: not knowing what your room does on its own is a different thing from it doing nothing.

Event costs only. Rent, utilities and stock sit outside it, the same as everywhere else here — it tells you what the night has to clear, not what the business has to.

How this show is selling

Every ticket you record carries the day you recorded it, so a ticketed night has a sales curve and your room has a history of curves that ended somewhere. That was only ever read once, on the night, to work out the door — which is the one moment it can no longer change anything. At two weeks out you can still add promotion, paper the house, or move an act down the bill.

• Compared against your Fri/Sat nights or your midweek ones, never against every past show — a Friday sells for three weeks and a Tuesday sells in the last four days, and pooling them describes neither.
• Your last twelve comparable nights, within about eighteen months. How a room sells moves — a new listing site, a refurbishment — and a Friday from three years ago is a worse guide than one from March.
• The middle night rather than the average, so one sell-out does not redefine normal and leave every night after it reading as a failure.
• Advance sales only. A walk-up cannot exist until the doors open, so counting them would measure a show three weeks out against a total it has no way to reach.

Three comparable nights before it will call a pace. Below that you get what you have sold and a note saying how many nights it has — one past Friday is an anecdote, and a single sold-out one would make every Friday after it read as failing.

If every ticket on your recent comparable nights was recorded on the night itself, there is no advance curve to pace against and it says that instead of inventing one. That is a recording habit rather than a result: entering sales as they come in is what turns them into something this can read.

A past night with no ticket lines at all is left out rather than counted as a night that sold nothing. A night nobody recorded is not a night nobody came to, and reading it as zero would drag the comparison to the floor and tell you that you were ahead of a room that simply was not counting.