Budget Musician Touring Tips

Budget Musician Touring Tips

So you want to keep track of your income and your expense. But you also want to have an understanding of the overall picture of your finances and how this business venture is going.

Make no mistake, this is not just fun and games. We’re talking about If you’re doing this full time and you want to support yourself, it is a business. It needs to make money So to do that, I create an entire budget sheet. And I have each particular income.

I have each particular item of merchandise that comes in to this. I show where all of my income comes from each of the different ventures that I have going on. I have the full band here. I got me and Paul together, the acoustic version. I got me by myself and then I got merchandise.

And that all comes in here. I put a goal of how much at the beginning of the year, I sit down and I say, “How much am I planning to make? Do I think I’m going to make in this?” And I use previous years experiences to decide that. And then you see that I take track of the actual amount that’s coming in. As I look throughout the year, I can see, am I getting closer to the target or not? Is it a realistic goal? That helps me to adjust for the next year. You see that down here I have a few things I call desirables.

Were a lap top for road use, a booking agent, a promo person and I just list those out. Those don’t actually, aren’t included in the actual total of my budget. But they’re costs of what I need to look at for things. I want to get. Then you can see that over here I got my total expenses. And all the expense items are listed.

So I can see, how much did I spend here for promotion last year? I planned on spending $50000 I spent $60500. Hey that was pretty cool

Pretty close to the target. Then I got my personal expenses. Each person I paid out of here. You see at the end of this thing, all of these categories fit in here through some formulas that I used that constructed in Excel, to the operating profit or loss I got a goal of $27,000

S0 I came out at $25,46683. Not too bad That’s pretty good as far as trying to forecast your year. You need a budget sheet.