You're Not Going to Run Out of Money. Until You Are.

There's a version of this story that plays out every year. A promoter has a strong quarter. Good shows, solid attendance, healthy margins on paper. And then one morning they open their bank account and the number doesn't make sense. It's lower than it should be. Much lower.

The shows were profitable. The settlements will come. But the deposits on next month's shows already went out. Marketing spend for three on-sales hit in the same week. Payroll cleared. Insurance renewed. And the settlement from last weekend's show won't land for a few more days because the venue hasn't processed it yet, while the artist's contract says a wire goes out the next business day.

Nothing went wrong. The business is healthy. But the bank account doesn't know that.

This is the timing problem, and it's baked into concert promotion. Cash doesn't move when you earn it. It moves when contracts say it moves, when platforms process it, when vendors demand it. A profitable show can leave you temporarily illiquid if you're not watching the calendar as carefully as the P&L.

The tool that solves this isn't complicated. It's a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast, a week-by-week projection of every dollar in and every dollar out, mapped to the week it actually hits or leaves your bank account. It's the most important financial document many promoters don't have.

Why Thirteen Weeks

The window matters. Thirteen weeks is one fiscal quarter. Long enough to see a cash crunch forming weeks before it arrives, short enough to forecast with real accuracy. Go shorter and you're just watching your bank balance. Go longer and your projections degrade into wishful thinking.

For promoters, the quarter horizon maps naturally to how the business already works. You're typically booking three to six months ahead, advertising spend starts at announcement and continues until you've mostly sold out or the show plays, and settlement timelines stretch days to a week after show dates. A 13-week view captures the full lifecycle of most active shows, from the week deposits go out through the week settlement cash arrives.

The rolling part is equally important. This isn't a static document you build once. Every week, the current week becomes history, a new Week 13 appears on the horizon, and the entire forecast shifts forward. It's a living view that gets more accurate over time as projected weeks become actual weeks and you calibrate your assumptions against reality.

What It Actually Tracks

The architecture is straightforward. Three sections, one answer.

Cash receipts — everything coming in. Ticket revenue settlements, sponsorship payments, co-promotion income, VIP and premium experience revenue. The discipline is dating each inflow to the week you'll actually receive the cash, not when the show happens or when the invoice goes out. A show on Saturday night doesn't put money in your account on Saturday night. It puts money in your account when the venue or ticketing provider settles. That timeline varies by partner, by deal structure, and by who holds the ticketing deal.

Cash disbursements — everything going out. This splits naturally into two categories. Fixed overhead runs regardless of show activity: payroll, office rent, insurance, subscriptions, legal and accounting fees. These tend to be roughly the same each month and are the most predictable line items in the forecast. Show costs move with your schedule: artist deposits and guarantees, advertising, and occasionally venue rent deposits. On advertising specifically, favorable terms with your ad partners can be a meaningful cash flow lever — monthly billing with net 30 means your marketing spend hits the bank account well after the campaigns run, which is fully dependent on your volume but worth negotiating. The bulk of show-day expenses — staffing, stagehands, catering, security — are typically routed through the venue, especially when the venue collected the ticket revenue. Those costs get netted against box office proceeds at settlement rather than hitting your bank account as separate outflows. Again, each direct outflow mapped to the week the cash actually leaves.

The bottom line — beginning cash balance, plus receipts, minus disbursements, equals ending cash balance. That ending balance carries forward as next week's opening balance. Run that calculation across thirteen columns and you have a picture of your cash position at every point in the quarter.

Below the weekly grid, two numbers tell the story at a glance: your ending cash balance and your minimum cash threshold, the floor below which operations are at risk. When the forecast shows the balance approaching that threshold, you have weeks to respond, not days. That's the entire point.

What Makes This Different for Promoters

A generic small business cash flow forecast works for a company with relatively predictable revenue and expenses. Concert promotion is not that business. The cash flow patterns are lumpy, asymmetric, and governed by deal terms that vary show to show.

Ticket Revenue Timing Depends on Who Holds the Ticketing Deal

This is the single most important thing to internalize: whoever has the ticketing deal — venue or promoter — is the party that collects the ticket revenue and holds it until settlement.

When the venue holds the ticketing deal (the most common arrangement), the promoter does not have access to ticket revenue during the on-sale period. Ticket proceeds are held by the venue and remitted after the show plays and settlement is processed. That timeline is typically one to six business days post-show.

When the promoter has their own ticketing deal, the economics are different and meaningfully better for cash flow. Ticket revenue is generally transferred weekly as sales happen, rather than in a lump sum after the show. Before the show plays, that money should be treated as held in escrow — if a show cancels, those funds need to be available for refunds. But once the show happens, that money is free and clear and can be spent on show costs and artist payments. This is one of the major advantages of having and using your own ticketing deal wherever possible.

The critical timing question is when you'll receive settlement funds versus when the artist expects to be paid. Many artist contracts require a wire the business day following the show, but the venue may not settle for several days after that. Even a few days of lag means you need to be prepared to pay the artist before the venue money arrives. The forecast makes this gap visible and quantifiable.

Artist Payments Work Differently for One-Offs and Tours

For one-off shows, artist deposits tend to be one and done. An active promoter who works with the same agencies frequently will typically pay a relatively small deposit — often around 10% of the guarantee — two to four weeks before the show, with the balance paid at settlement. Newer promoters who don't have established relationships with an agency may be required to pay a higher deposit earlier, sometimes before the show is even announced. This is a normal push and pull of deal negotiation, and it changes as the business relationship matures.

Tours work differently. It's not uncommon to have a payment schedule with multiple installments before the tour begins. This commonly exists to finance the tour's production costs so the artist isn't wildly out of pocket at any given time. Settlement arrangements for tours can vary, but it's common to pay the guarantee portion of artist payments (less the prorated deposits and advance payments) weekly, with some buffer to leave enough time to receive funds from venues. A typical structure might be paying weekly on Thursdays for the previous Saturday-to-Friday shows, giving you three to four business days to collect venue settlement funds before the guarantee payments go out. The artist side will push for faster payments; the promoter side will push to wait until funds are received, lest they need to ask investors or the bank for a bigger cash float to cover the lag. For cross-collateralized tours that end up in percentage, overage payments are generally handled after the tour wraps — you'd calculate the total amount owed to the artist and pay the bulk of it within five to ten business days of the final show, holding back a small reserve for late-arriving bills that haven't been reconciled yet.

A promoter with a full calendar of active shows might have deposit or guarantee payments going out every week. Not because anything is wrong, but because that's how the deal structures cascade across a schedule. The 13-week forecast shows you the aggregate outflow pattern, not just the per-show picture.

Co-Promotion Changes Everything

When you're co-promoting, the cash flow picture depends entirely on the deal structure. Which entity is advancing costs? How and when does the settlement split happen? Is the co-promotion partner contributing capital upfront, or reimbursing after the fact?

The forecast needs to reflect your share: the cash you're actually putting out and the cash you're actually receiving. This is show-specific and deal-specific, which is why a single master forecast isn't sufficient. Each show needs its own cash timeline that feeds into the master view.

Seasonality Creates Canyons

If your business has a concentrated show season (and most promoters have some degree of seasonality) the 13-week forecast reveals the cash canyon. That's the period where you're spending heavily to set up the upcoming season (deposits, marketing, production planning) but revenue from those shows hasn't started flowing back yet. Knowing the depth and duration of that canyon, weeks in advance, is the difference between managing it and being surprised by it.

The Weekly Discipline

The forecast is only useful if it's current. A stale forecast is arguably worse than no forecast at all, because it creates false confidence in numbers that no longer reflect reality.

The rhythm is weekly. Every Monday (or Tuesday, if settlements land on Monday) sit down with the forecast and do three things.

First, update the current week with actuals. What actually came in? What actually went out? Replace projections with real numbers and note the variance. If you projected a settlement of $85,000 and received $78,000, that's a data point. Over time, those variances calibrate your forecasting accuracy.

Second, roll the forecast forward. Last week's projections become this week's history. Everything shifts one column to the left. A new Week 13 appears at the end, and you populate it with what you know about that week: confirmed expenses, expected settlements, overhead.

Third, scan the horizon. Are there any weeks where the ending balance drops below your minimum threshold? If so, you have time to act. Accelerate a receivable, defer a discretionary expense, draw on a credit line. Whatever the response is, you're choosing it with lead time. Not scrambling when the bank balance hits zero.

If this weekly rhythm sounds familiar, it should. It's the financial version of the structured weekly check-in that frameworks like EOS are built around — a small number of metrics reviewed consistently, with enough lead time to act on what you see.

Where This Lives

The tool question comes up immediately, and the honest answer is less interesting than people want it to be.

Your accounting software (QuickBooks, SAP, NetSuite, whatever you use) is the system of record for what has already happened. It tells you what came in and went out. What it doesn't do well is forward-looking, week-by-week cash forecasting. The built-in cash flow reports in most accounting platforms are backward-looking summaries, not rolling forecasts.

A spreadsheet (Google Sheets for collaboration, Excel if you prefer it) is where most companies build this, including sophisticated ones. The flexibility of a spreadsheet for a model that requires constant human judgment is genuinely hard to beat. The weakness is that it's disconnected from your source data and requires manual discipline to maintain.

Purpose-built cash flow forecasting tools exist and some integrate with your accounting software. They can automate parts of the process: pulling actuals, projecting recurring expenses, visualizing the timeline. The limitation is that none of them are built for the specific lumpiness of concert promotion. They're designed for businesses with more predictable revenue patterns.

The right answer for most promoters is some combination: a forecasting model where you exercise judgment on timing and amounts, reconciled weekly against actuals from your accounting system. The tool matters less than the practice.

For what it's worth, this is something we're building into Mogul. Because Mogul already tracks show-level deal terms, payment schedules, and settlement timelines, it can generate a running show-cost cash flow automatically — one less thing to maintain by hand. That module is still in development, but it's the kind of problem purpose-built software should solve.

What the Forecast Won't Do

It won't make bad deals good, increase ticket sales, or negotiate better settlement terms with your partners.

What it will do is eliminate the most dangerous kind of surprise: the kind where you're profitable but broke, where the business is healthy but the bank account isn't, where the cash you need to fund next month's shows is sitting in a settlement queue you can't accelerate.

In concert promotion, the margin between a well-managed company and one in crisis is often not profitability. It's timing. The 13-week forecast makes timing visible. It converts a vague sense that "cash is tight" into a specific picture: you'll be $40,000 short in Week 7, unless you take one of these three actions before then.

That clarity is worth the hour a week it takes to maintain. Because you're not going to run out of money. Until, one morning, the bank account says otherwise. And by then, the window to do something about it has already closed.