Guide · Playbooks

Settlement night: a quick checklist

Last updated 13 June 2026

Settlement is the five minutes that decide whether a show actually made money. Do it the same way every night and it stops being a guessing game. Here's a routine you can run in the venue office before you load out, so the numbers are fresh and nobody's chasing receipts a week later.

Before you settle

Pull up the show on /shows and open its Finances tab. Have your deal in front of you so you're checking real numbers against what was agreed, not what you half-remember.

• Confirm the deal terms. Guarantee, door split, or guarantee-versus-percentage with a threshold — know which one applies before anyone hands you cash. If you advanced it properly, it's already on the show.
• Count the merch. Reconcile what you sold against starting stock so the merch total is solid before it folds into the night's take.

The settlement, step by step

1. Log the gross. Enter the headline figure first — the full door or the guarantee — as income on the show.
2. Enter every deduction. Venue cut, support payments, production costs, agent or manager commission. Each one gets its own line so the math is auditable later, not buried in a single "fees" number.
3. Record the net take-home. This is what the band actually walks away with. ArtistHQ resolves it for you — your /money reports use the settled number, not the headline fee, so tour profitability reflects reality.
4. Pay the crew. Anyone assigned to the show with a day rate flows into the Band Bank. Mark them paid tonight while the cash is in hand, and the Bank tracks who's earned, paid, and still owed.

Why bother every night

The deal you agreed and the money that landed are rarely identical. A nightly settlement catches the gap — a deduction you forgot, a door count that came up short — while you can still ask about it. Skip it and those gaps compound across a tour until the totals don't mean anything.

For the deeper mechanics, see tracking money and how settlement ties into the show pipeline in managing shows. On Plus and Pro you can export the whole thing as a CSV report for your accountant.

Settled a tricky one and not sure where a number should land? Email us at hello@artisthq.app — we'll walk through it with you.