3 things we’re doing to make profitable tours possible

In this post, we discuss the 3 things we're focused on to help artists and (tour / business) managers ensure profitable tours: making a tour budget, tracking actuals against that budget, and making The Pack work with the software you already use.

In Case You Missed It, our big dream is to help you ensure more artists can tour profitably, resulting in more shows for all of us to enjoy, and a world full of happy touring crew and suppliers. To get there, we’ve been listening to your needs, and are working hard on solutions that leverage what you already use, rather than forcing you to adapt to new systems.

We’ve focused 3 big things in order to make the dream happen - and we’re hoping you’ll put them to good use.

Here are the 3 things we’ve focused on to make profitable tours possible:

Making a tour budget
Tracking actuals vs that budget
Making The Pack work with what you already use.

In order of appearance:

1 - Making a tour budget:

We know every tour budget is unique, and some expenses need to be planned for in detail while for others a broad estimate will do. And we heard from you that getting a final budget approved before the tour is a crucial step. That is why:

You can add both quick budget items (“1000$ for Lights”) and detailed budget items (“50$ Per Diem for every tour day + an advance rate for every show day + …) to your budget.
We’ve built a report that includes a budget overview per high-level budget category (Wages, Production, Accommodation, Travel, Admin, Tax & Insurance,, Commissions).
The same report als makes it easy to keep an overview of the profit and loss for the tour, the detailed budget and estimates and more.
You can request an approval directly from the report, saving you time emailing excels back and forth, and making it easy to identify the formal moment of budget approval.

2 - Tracking actuals vs your budget:

We’ve heard time and time again that keeping track of actuals on the road is a pain for tour managers, managers and business managers alike. This is the most time consuming and manual part of tour admin, but doing this well can help spot discrepancies like overspending early - when you can still take action to remedy the situation and save tour profitability. That is why:

You can keep track of actuals by simply adding any invoice or receipt you receive directly to the budget. Amounts and line items will be extracted for you, so you only have to verify we got it right.
You can track payment status directly on the actuals as well - automatically if we can find the last 4 numbers of the credit card on the receipt, or manually when you’re tracking cash or bank transfer payments.
We’ve built a clear visual representation of how your actuals are trending versus your budget, so you know at all times when you need to take action on something.

3 - Making The Pack work with what you already use:

You’re a busy person, and you’ve been in this industry for a while, so you’ve got systems in place already to help you do what you need to do. We understand that having different systems not playing nice with each other can be frustrating (we get frustrated too!). To solve for that we’ve focused on working with what you already have rather than forcing you to adapt to something new. That is why:

You can export your data from The Pack in whichever way you want. We created standard data exports with the high level budget, a detailed budget vs actuals overview, a daily expense overview, and more.
We also created an export in the standard quickbooks format - especially to make business managers and accountants happy and to save a ton of time in the financial finalization of the tour.
We launched a dedicated integration service that focuses 100% on connecting the software tools you're already using to help you save time, reduce errors, and focus on what matters. We’re happy to say this service focuses on more than just making things play nice with The Pack - if you have other software-related questions, hit us up and we’ll let you know if we can help.

If this sounds exciting to you, Subscribe here for a free trial, or schedule a demo if you want to hang out with us before trying!

We’ll go into more detail on each of these capabilities in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

For more reading on profitable tours, check out these posts: