Finance & reporting
Know which events actually made money.
Your accountant can tell you in September how the season went. This tells you in March — every bill, invoice, cash box, and merch count landing on the event that caused it, while you can still do something about it.
Best forOwners, directors, and whoever does the books- Brand, event, and category on every line
- Estimated vs actual, flagged per line
- Balanced journal entries out to QuickBooks
Season to date
EBITDA · weekend by weekend
Illustrative numbers. Yours compute themselves — weekend by weekend, while the season is still running.
- One engine for the page, the export, and the AI assistant
- Every line flagged estimated or actual
- Your books stay in QuickBooks — we send the entries
P&L · builds itself
Nashville Fall Classic
- 98,426
Registration payments
$100,432 from 42 studios − $2,006 refunds
- 15,465
Merchandise sales
$24,380 sales − $8,915 COGS
- 2,635
Concessions
$4,120 sales − $1,485 COGS
- (14,328)
Travel
Flights $11,304 + cars & rideshares $3,024
- (9,500)
Venue
Signed contract · $8,000 hall + $1,500 AV
- (10,200)
PayrollEstimated
17 staff × day rates × 3 event days
Net · margin 64%
$82,498
A scripted demo with scripted numbers — but this is the shape: operations write the lines, merch counts and receipts fill in the rest, and the report is ready before the truck is unpacked.
One source of truth
Ops writes it once. Finance reads it live.
The P&L reads from the same records your team runs the weekend on — the booked flight, the signed contract, the approved vendor bill, the counted cash box. No month-end reconciliation meeting, no chasing receipts through inboxes, no wondering which spreadsheet is current. When operations move, the numbers move with them.
- Nobody re-types anything, so nothing gets re-typed wrong
- The question gets answered in the room, not next Tuesday
- Ops and finance argue about decisions, not whose number is right
How it works
The P&L builds itself while you operate.
Costs land as they happen
Book a flight, sign a venue, approve a vendor bill — each becomes a coded line.
Revenue lands as it's collected
Registration payments, paid invoices, and the merch counted at Sunday close.
Estimates harden into actuals
The posted bill supersedes the booked estimate, and the label says which is which.
Roll up, compare, hand off
Season totals, budgets, margin trends — out as Excel, CSV, or QuickBooks entries.
The full ledger
The whole money side, in one place.
A profit number is only worth what the records underneath it are worth. So the records live here too — payables, receivables, people costs, inventory, and the cash counted at the door.
Bills, coded on the way in
Vendor bills carry their GL account, brand, and event from the moment someone enters them. Approval thresholds route the big ones to a human before they're payable, and AP aging shows what's due, what's late, and what's already paid.
Invoices studios actually receive
Sequenced invoice numbers, sent as a customer-facing link your studios open in email — no login, no PDF attachment nobody can find. Receivables aging and statements chase the balance, and credit memos handle adjustments without anyone editing history.
What the people cost, before they're paid
Day rates, event rates, travel days, and per diems resolve from the roster you already staffed, so payroll stops being a number you guess at in the budget. Faculty honoraria become coded bills like any other, and the year's totals sit ready when 1099 season arrives.
Inventory and assets that account for themselves
Merchandise movements post their own cost of goods against the event that sold them. Capitalized gear carries depreciation on a schedule, and the asset register exports in a form your insurer will accept without a rebuild.
Booked costs that give way to real ones
A hotel block, a rental, a freight leg — each lands on the P&L as an estimate the day it's booked. When the vendor's bill posts, it supersedes the estimate rather than sitting beside it, so nothing gets counted twice.
Sunday's cash, counted into the ledger
Cash boxes, card batches, and merch counts settle on-site with attestations naming who counted and who verified. Finalizing posts revenue and cost of goods to the event; voiding reverses every line it wrote.
All of it is brand-aware: a producer running three brands out of one office gets each one's numbers separately and consolidated, without keeping three sets of books. What it isn't: payroll processing, tax withholding, filing of any kind, or a bank feed. Those stay where they are.
Show-day settlement
The cash drawer counts itself into the P&L.
Load-out used to be where the numbers went dark — cash in an envelope, a merch count on a legal pad, a card batch nobody reconciles until the statement lands. Settlement closes the event on-site instead: count it, attest it, finalize it.
- Cash boxes and card batches counted against what the system expected
- Merch counts post revenue and their own cost of goods, per event
- Attestations name who counted and who verified — voiding reverses the lot
Show-day settlement
Nashville Fall Classic · Sunday close
- 1,215.00
Cash box · merch table
Counted twice, banked Sunday night
- 4,245.00
Card batch · terminal 2
137 charges, settled to your account
- (2,020.00)
Merch count · opened 412, closed 230
182 units sold — cost of goods computed
Posted to the event P&L
- Merchandise sales5,460.00
- Merchandise COGS(2,020.00)
- Net to Nashville3,440.00
Attested by M. Ruiz, verified by D. Okafor · 9:42 PM. Voiding reverses every line it posted — nothing gets quietly edited.
Illustrative demo — scripted numbers, real workflow.
Season rollup & budgets
The season table can't disagree with the event tab.
Every row of the season rollup is that event's full report, recomputed — not a cached copy that drifts. Budgets sit beneath, measured against the same numbers.
- Net and margin per event, with a season trend line
- One brand at a time, or all of them consolidated
- Budgets by season, event, or category
- The formula is printed on the page, not buried in a cell
Budgets vs actuals
Measured against the report on screen — never a second ledger
Travel · season 2026
$86.4k of $120k
Venue · Nashville Fall Classic
$9.5k of $9k · over
Registration revenue · season 2026
$412k of $470k target
Over-budget costs get a badge; a revenue target you beat never does.
Season insights
The AI narrates. It never does the math.
Insight cards flag year-over-year swings, margin outliers, and budget overruns — each computed by tested rules, the same math every time. The model only writes the sentence.
- Boise 2026 compares against Boise 2025, by name
- Registration pace measured against your own past events
- Model down? The fact cards render anyway
Venue costs are $4,200 over budget
Biggest overshoot this season. Two events have no venue cost recorded yet.
Charlotte margin leads the season by 18 points
Same venue as last year, but travel came in 22% lower.
Every number is computed by tested rules — the same math every time. The AI writes the sentence around it and is barred from inventing a figure.
QuickBooks
Your books stay in QuickBooks. The re-keying stops.
HerdingCats captures every cost and payment while the event is running, then sends balanced journal entries — Class = brand, Location = event — so your accountant never has to rebuild the P&L from spreadsheets.
- Download QuickBooks-ready journal files today — balanced, coded, event-tagged
- Class carries the brand and Location carries the event, so multi-brand producers stay separated in the books they already keep
- Direct QuickBooks Online sync is in development; the files work now
- We are not the general ledger, and we never file anything on your behalf
nashville-fall-classic-je.csv
BalancedJournal entry JE-2026-0142
Class = brand · Location = event · one entry per event close
| Account | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|
1010 · Undeposited funds Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 24,380.00 | |
1210 · Accounts receivable Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 12,940.00 | |
4010 · Registration fees Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 31,860.00 | |
4200 · Merchandise sales Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 5,460.00 | |
5100 · Merchandise COGS Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 2,020.00 | |
1400 · Merchandise inventory Redline Dance · NAS-2026 | 2,020.00 | |
| Totals | 39,340.00 | 39,340.00 |
Illustrative demo — scripted numbers, real workflow.
Packaging:Finance & Reporting is an add-on to the platform, and everything on this page turns on together. What it costs lives on one page, beside the rest.
See pricingAlso in this module
The details accountants ask about.
- Brand and event on every line
- AP aging with approval thresholds
- Sequenced invoices and statements
- Credit memos, not hand-edits
- 1099 totals, ready to hand over
- Depreciation on a schedule
- Insurance-ready asset register
- Estimates keep their history
- Excel, CSV, and QuickBooks journal files
Retire the desk calculator
Every number on this page computes itself.
The report, the rollup, the budgets, the aging, the settlement sheet — tested rules, the same math every time. Which frees up the ten-key on your desk for its true calling. Go ahead, press equals.
Herding Cats
EL-1977 · solar-ish
0
*Consult your accountant. The keys work; the answers have opinions.
Run the numbers
Put one event's costs in and read its margin.
Load one weekend's costs and the margin stops being a guess. The surprising one usually turns up first.
- Free for up to 5 events
- No card required
- Cancel any time