What’s Missing from Your Tour Management Software?

Your Tour Management Software May Need a Boost

Tour management software is critical to maintaining and increasing your productivity. Most of the available tools will offer separate ways to keep track of your “to-do’s” and “done” tasks. But how good are they at helping you to visualize historical or projected data for a better sense of control over your time and resources? 

Popular products may offer a personalized directory with real-time collaboration, itinerary planning, basic accounting, guest list management, and a searchable venue database. While all of these features are necessary to create great concerts, they are missing integration and several other essential items to make a more streamlined live music management. 

For instance, pulling off a live music event starts with bookings. Tour management software doesn’t offer a way to place holds and book shows directly from your calendar. This is important because so much of what talent buyers, tour agents, and venue managers/owners do is filling up the calendar with great shows. 

If you are a tour manager, you could get more from a calendar where you can see every hold and booked shows for months out. Venue owners and talent buyers could use purposely-built live music management software to manage holds for all of your rooms and shows on one calendar. 

A more current approach to live music management software includes several other features in one place, such as offer generation capability, detailed financial reports to track revenue and expenses in real-time, team and stakeholder collaboration, and internal and external show settlement.

Let’s break those features down a bit. 

Calendar

Your calendar is about more than keeping everyone in sync or listing out a to-do list for each day. Yes, you need your team to know what’s coming up and what their schedules are. But for venue owners, an interactive calendar could do so much more:

• Add multiple dates and holds to a show
• Pull and share avails with talent agents or promoters
• Generate appropriate hold levels across multiple dates automatically 

The above could turn a basic calendar into a powerful tool. Tour managers and agents need to see where they have holds and bookings, ensuring everything lines up on the tour calendar for a seamless travel schedule.

Related: How to Make the Most out of Your Music Performance Contracts

Offer Generation

As a venue owner or manager, how much time do you spend building offers? Eventbrite surveyed nearly 50 live music venues and found that the average venue employee spends up to four hours every day on booking and ticketing alone. 

You may have a template that makes things a bit easier, but you need to customize offers for each show. You’re still likely taking plenty of time out of your day tweaking those templates to fit precise requirements. 

However, with top tour management software, you can create and send your own branded offers in seconds. The software still leverages templates, but they are flexible to set up different templates based on the deal and room type.

This software could let you select a matching template with a few clicks and send it to the agent or talent. Even better, as you build your offer, you can see real-time calculations to help you understand if it will be profitable and what you have to offer simply to break even. 

Comparing scenarios will better equip you to build effective and profit-generating offers on more deals —no more guessing or agreeing to unbeneficial terms for your business. With this kind of visibility, you can run your business smarter.

These kinds of financials are essential for everyone involved in the live music business. For talent and tour managers, you want to know what’s needed to break even and turn a profit. By conducting what-if scenarios, you will reduce your risk for agreeing to disadvantageous terms for you and your team.

Revenue and Expense Tracking

Traditional tour management software may offer a basic financial overview, but you probably know by now that managing your venue or your tour is anything but basic. You need to be aware of more than how your tour is doing at any given moment. 

Ideally, you should forecast by using leading software, which lets you automatically collect historical and real-time data to analyze your current and future financial status. When your financials integrate directly with your ticketing platform, you can see what happens to your numbers as soon as someone purchases a ticket.

Imagine this for a moment: Instead of waiting for the ticketing company to generate and send you a report, typically once or twice a week, you can see sales as they happen so you can be more proactive in how you manage your business. 

This financial data could provide foresight, giving you a glimpse into how well (or not) the show is attracting buyers. You could use this information to adjust your marketing strategy, ticket pricing tiers, and future talent booking and shows.

An ideal tour management software would also enable you to send invoices and track expenses as they occur instead of after settlement. Again, this improves your ability to make adjustments to your budgets and spending habits before issues can derail your ability to turn a profit.

Related: 3 Benefits of Integrating Event Management Software with Event Ticketing Software

Settlement

Most shows end in the wee hours of the night, not exactly when you are running at full steam. You’re tired and so is your team. Old-school tour management software has nothing to help with settlements, but the best live music management software does. Whether you are the talent, an agent, or a venue manager, the faster you can get through the settlement part of the night, the quicker you can get paid and relax.

The most helpful software enables venue managers to generate their own branded settlement sheet with a single click to immediately settle with the agent, artist, or tour manager. It doesn’t get any easier or faster than that. 

This platform goes a step further and allows you to calculate accurate tax payments and other variable expenses just as quickly so you pay exactly what you owe and nothing more or less. Your books are instantly updated to include any adjustments and the payout method per show, per artist, per settlement.

The key to all of this, and the reason why live music professionals need more than disconnected tour management software tools, is real-time data visualization. It’s one thing to see show performance status. It’s quite another to generate interactive in-depth reports, revealing every show’s profit and loss so you can make more informed decisions going forward.

By consolidating all of the financial data in one place, you save time by not tracking numbers in different systems and manually input data. Everything is automated, revealing actual net, marketing ROI, additional revenue streams, taxes owed and paid, sales trends, shows’ profitability, and employee productivity. No more digging through spreadsheets, either. Your financial information is displayed on an interactive dashboard and in shareable reports. 

All of this data is power. Power to be more responsive and agile to changes in the industry and your local scene and to make profit projections in the context of other variables, such as marketing spend, ticket sales, and offers. 

By choosing a modern platform, you’ll know how to balance and prioritize your spending based on your expected income instead of blindly signing checks and contracts, affecting your yearly revenue. Find software to help you run your business profitably while taking care of your employees and your clients without sacrificing the long-term success of your business.

Prism is the ultimate all-in-one live music management software, created with the unique needs of music industry professionals in mind. Boost your productivity with a myriad of features, created to save you time and money while planning your following amazing shows. Get started now.