How many tickets must you sell to break even?
Ticket price down the side, attendance across the top, profit in every cell. At forty dollars you need 447 people through the door, and the platform fee is quietly taking one of them in every thirteen.
Words on this sheet
- Venue: The place an event is held. A venue line is what hiring it costs, usually a fixed amount whatever the turnout.
- Contribution: What is left of the income after the costs that come with it, before the fixed costs are paid.
Operations Starter Data Table free
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Ticket Price Covers the Room?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
- The plan as priced
- -$1,320 $40 a ticket and 400 through the door
- Break-even at $40
- 447 tickets, after the platform fee and catering come out
- Contribution a head
- $28.20 of each $40 ticket, against $12,600 of fixed cost
- The other lever
- $44 four dollars on the price turns 400 heads profitable
A one-night music or comedy promotion in a 700-capacity room. Two numbers decide whether it makes money and you only control one of them. The sheet opens at $40 a ticket and 400 people: $16,000 of gross revenue, $960 to the ticketing platform, $3,760 of catering and wristbands, $12,600 of fixed cost, and a loss of $1,320. Click Run and the table fills in the profit for every price from $28 to $56 against every attendance from 250 to 700.
The break-even boundary runs diagonally through it. At $28 a ticket you need 745 people, which is more than the room holds, so that whole price is unreachable however the night goes. At $40 you need 447. At $52 you need 320. At $56 you need 292. The most useful thing on the grid is that first price: a $28 ticket in a 700-capacity room cannot break even even if you sell every seat, and no amount of promotion changes it.
That is worth checking before the price is announced rather than afterwards, and it gets missed because $28 times 700 is $19,600 and $19,600 sounds like plenty. The contribution line shows why it is not. Contribution a head at $28 is $16.92, not $28: the platform takes 6% of the face value and catering takes $9.40, so more than a third of a cheap ticket is gone before it reaches the fixed costs.
At $56 the contribution is $43.24, so the second half of the price is worth far more than the first half. Run it again with the platform fee set to zero, which is what a direct-sales or door-only night looks like, and break-even at $40 falls from 447 to 412. Thirty-five people, about $1,400 of ticket revenue, is what the convenience of a ticketing platform costs this event.
That is a real decision, not a rounding error. What the model does not carry is that price and attendance are related, and the direction is against you: the corner where the price is high and the room is full is the least likely combination on the grid. Put your own venue, production and staffing costs in, your real per-head cost, and your platform's actual rate.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Ticket Price and Attendance:
| Ticket price ($) | 40 |
| Tickets sold | 400 |
| Venue hire ($) | 6500 |
| Production and AV ($) | 4200 |
| Staff and security ($) | 1900 |
| Fixed cost ($) | 12,600 |
| Catering and wristband a head ($) | 9.4 |
| Ticketing platform fee | 0.06 |
| Gross ticket revenue ($) | 16,000 |
| Platform fee ($) | 960 |
| Net ticket revenue ($) | 15,040 |
plus 4 more rows on the sheet.
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Is it the venue or the time of year?Venue and Month: What Drives Attendance?
- What does outsourcing cost once you price the risks?Outsource or Keep It In House?
- Are three of your regions really scoring the same?Do the Regions Rate Us Differently?
- The season looks fine on pace. Is it really?Will the Season Fill?
- Should weekends be staffed like any other day?Weekday and Weekend Are Not the Same Business
- What is the standing recipe costing you a tonne?The Cheapest Blend That Meets the Spec
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: What-if analysis in Google Sheets.