Settle the show before the truck is loaded.
Live events settle at the venue on the night: the guarantee, the backend split once the box office closes, the stagehands, runners, security and catering, and the vendors who are packing up while the tour accountant does the math. DiscoFi calculates the settlement, pays everyone on it, and reconciles the show without waiting for a bank file to clear on Tuesday.
Settlement is a deadline, not a process.
The box office closes and the arithmetic starts. The guarantee is fixed, the backend depends on the count, expenses come off the top, and the split is defined by a deal memo that lives in someone’s email. Around that sit the stagehands, the runners, the security detail and the caterer, most of them independent contractors, most of them expecting to be paid tonight or very soon.
The tour accountant does this in a spreadsheet in a production office at eleven at night, then enters it again into a banking portal the next morning, and the crew waits. Do that four nights a week across a routing and the reconciliation debt compounds faster than anyone can pay it down.
The math and the money in the same place.
- Build the settlementGuarantee, expenses, the backend split and the crew sheet resolve into one payable figure per recipient on the night.
- Approve at the venueWhoever signs the settlement approves the payouts it produces, from the same screen, with the approval recorded.
- Pay before load-outCrew and vendors are paid to their own accounts, built for instant delivery.
- Close the showEvery payment reconciles against the settlement that produced it, so a routing of thirty shows closes thirty times rather than once in arrears.
Every payout is built for instant delivery.* See Instant Pay disclosure Your team decides who gets paid and how much; the payout API handles everything after that.
What a night-of settlement looks like.
One show, illustrative
- Artist guaranteePer deal memo$65,000.00
- Backend splitAfter expenses, on the count$18,420.00
- Stagehands22 hands, load-in and out$14,300.00
- Security and runners16 contractors$6,850.00
- Catering and vendors4 vendors$9,180.00
- Settlement$113,750.00
43 recipients · Settled night-of · One ledger
Illustrative figures for a hypothetical operation, not a DiscoFi customer or a DiscoFi metric.
Questions this raises.
Can we settle at the venue rather than the next morning?
That is the point of the design. The settlement math and the payment happen in the same system, so approving the settlement is what sends the money rather than the first of two separate jobs.
How do backend splits that depend on the final count work?
The split is a calculation, so the final count produces the payable amounts. Nobody re-derives the artist share by hand once the box office reports.
What about crew we use at one venue and never again?
One-off crew are recipients like any other. They are paid to the account they already have, and their tax information stays attached whether they work one show or forty.
Does this replace our tour accounting?
No. It replaces the gap between the settlement sheet and the bank, which is where the retyping, the delay and most of the reconciliation work currently live.
Worth reading next.
Run your next settlement on DiscoFi.
Starts at $1,000/month plus 0.28% of successful payout volume.
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