Settle the show before the truck is loaded.
The count is final. The night should be too.
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.
The encore ended. Why is the money still here?
The stage is coming down. The trucks are loading. Everyone in the building is already thinking about the next city. The financial operation should be able to do the same.
Instead 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.
So the tour accountant builds it 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. Four nights a week across a routing, and the unfinished settlements follow the tour from city to city.
The math and the money. Same night.
- ResolveThe guarantee, the expenses and the backend split resolve against the final count, so the settlement is a calculation rather than a rebuild.
- Add the roomStagehands, runners, security, catering and vendors join the same settlement instead of becoming a second list for the morning.
- Approve and payApproving the settlement is what sends the money, over the fastest delivery method each recipient can accept.
- Close the showEvery payment resolves against the settlement that created it, so no unfinished run follows the tour to the next city.
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
- Artist guaranteeHeadliner, per deal memo$65,000.00
- Backend splitSupport act, on the count$18,420.00
- Stagehands21 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
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.
Nobody should drive home wondering.
A stagehand who was paid before load-out finished and a stagehand who was paid the following Tuesday did the same work for two different promoters. Only one of them has to remember it tomorrow.
Worth reading next.
Close tonight.
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