Gottwood Festival
Anglesey, North Wales
Josh handles the books for Gottwood Festival. He closed this year's accounts two to three days after the show ended, on his own. A comparable festival still working from spreadsheets takes two to three weeks, and more than one person.
Josh has closed festival accounts both ways - inside Eventwise, and the old way, in spreadsheets. He's seen how long the second one actually takes: two to three weeks, and it's rarely a one-person job. Someone else usually gets pulled in just to get the numbers to a state the client can sign off on.
The gap isn't effort. It's where the effort goes. A year's worth of suppliers, invoices and budget changes end up scattered across email threads and spreadsheet tabs. Closing the books becomes a manual hunt to pull that scattered data into one place and check it against itself, line by line.
Gottwood isn't a small close to begin with. A four-day, multi-stage festival with close to 250 artists on the bill means hundreds of supplier relationships, deposits, and final invoices - all before a single ticket is scanned.
An invoice that touched several purchase orders got matched to all of them at once - not hunted down and matched one by one.
Payment status came straight through from Xero on its own. No cross-checking the bank against every line by hand.
All ~120 artist budget lines were updated as things changed, so nothing needed reconstructing after the fact.
Every time an artist was confirmed or a cost changed, that line got updated on the spot - not left for Josh to piece together from memory once the event was over.
Purchase orders were already sitting there waiting, so when supplier invoices came in, they had somewhere to go - instead of starting from a blank sheet.
By the time Josh sat down to close the books, most of the work was already there. He was confirming the numbers, not assembling them.
"You're not working off half the picture. Everything's tracked line by line, all year - so there's nothing to fix at the end."
- Josh, on closing Gottwood Festival's booksDays, not weeks. A comparable spreadsheet-based close takes Josh's peers two to three weeks and more than one person. Gottwood was closed two to three days after the show, solo.
No last-minute swings. Because the budget was tracked line by line all year, the final numbers matched projections from a month out - not adjusted into shape at the finish line.
Next year's conversation started on time. Because the numbers were current all year, Gottwood could start talking about next year's edition while this one was still running, not weeks after it closed.
Bigger festival, same headcount. A four-day, multi-stage event with close to 250 artists closed without anyone extra brought in to manage it.
artist budget lines, live and up to date all year - the detail that's easy to lose track of when it's scattered across spreadsheets instead of kept in one place.
Eventwise keeps the budget, the POs and the payment status live all year - so closing the books is a final check, not the whole job.