The Profit / Loss field is the last calculated field in this template, and it's the field that justifies every other field above it. It's the number that tells you whether the Champagne Shed made money on a Saturday or absorbed a loss before the kitchen staff were tipped out. Everything upstream feeds into it — Total Income minus Total Expenses — and if the inputs are wrong, so is that number.
When Venue Bookings Pile Up and the Numbers Go Soft
Running an event venue on manual records is fine until you have three weddings in a six-week block and a corporate booking sitting between them. At that point, the question of which event has made its final payment, which supplier hasn't been settled, and whether the kitchen wage bill for the second weekend has actually been entered — those stop being administrative details and start being cash flow problems.
The six-stage payment schedule (Venue Deposit plus five subsequent payments, each with its own date field) is the financial architecture of this template. The Total field sums them: #{venue deposit}+#{pay 1}+#{pay 2}+#{pay 3}+#{pay 4}+#{pay 5}+#{pay 6}. The Final Balance Due field subtracts that from the Total Event Cost calculation. At any point before the event, you can open a record and see immediately how much is still owed. A client who's made three of five payments in a R15,000 booking and is two weeks out from their event date — that's a conversation you need to have, and this template surfaces it.
The Total Event Cost calculation itself has a nuance worth noting: (#{price per person}*#{adult guests})+(#{price per person}*#{kids under 12}/2). Children under 12 are billed at half the adult rate. Children under 6 are tracked separately but not included in the billing formula — presumably they attend free or at a rate set separately in Special Notes. The template is honest about the pricing structure rather than obscuring it in a flat per-head count.
The Three Cost Streams That Determine Whether an Event Pays
An event venue carries three distinct outgoing streams: supplier costs, staff wages, and own-supply costs. This template tracks all three in parallel.
Nine supplier slots (Amount 1 through Amount 9, each with a supplier name and payment date) capture every external vendor — florist, DJ, rental chairs, external caterer, photographer. The Total Purchases field aggregates them. Six wage entries (Wage 1 through Wage 6, each with a name field) cover the kitchen team, the event coordinator, the bar staff. Total Wages sums those. The Own Supplies checklist — Savories, Fancies, Sweets Table, Special Table Gifts — tracks what the venue itself is providing rather than outsourcing, which affects the cost structure without appearing in the supplier or wage totals.
Total Expenses combines purchases and wages. Total Income mirrors the payments received total. The Profit / Loss field delivers the verdict.
The Catering Layer That Actually Prevents Day-Of Problems
The canape list runs twenty-five options: tempura prawns, bobotie spring rolls, snoek cakes, steak strippies, greek philo parcels, cocktail burgers. The starters offer five options; the mains include steak, chicken cordon bleu, spinach fillet, chicken pie. Sides cover fourteen options from wedges and pumpkin fritters to cous cous salad and butternut and beetroot salad.
These aren't decorative fields. They're the confirmation record that the client signed off on a specific menu, at a specific price point, for a specific guest count that includes a recorded number of Halaal, Vegetarian, and Vegan covers. When the head chef asks at 9am on the event day what the dietary breakdown is, you open the record. When the Halaal guests arrive and the catering team needs confirmation of which dishes were prepared Halaal-certified, the number is there. That prevents the call to the client on their wedding morning.
The Bar Details checkboxes — Outside, Inside, Tab, Table Wine, Champagne, Juice — confirm the beverage arrangement. Ceremony checkboxes cover Panel Shop, chair type (own or rented), tie backs, confetti authorization, streaming. Floor and Table checkboxes confirm table configuration, DJ or own sound, underplate type, and whether a table plan is in use.
Every one of these is a pre-event confirmation that either happens during booking or causes a problem on the day.