Budgeting Archives - Exhibit Day

Converting Costs from Foreign Currencies

As you enter costs for your events in ExhibitDay, you may encounter situations where the incurred expense is in a different currency than your Workspace’s base currency (as defined in your Workspace Settings). In such cases, you’ll need to convert the cost to your Workspace’s base currency before entering the amount into ExhibitDay.

ExhibitDay’s Currency Conversion Assistant can help you with that!

Next to every cost field in ExhibitDay, there is a “currency conversion” icon. Clicking that icon will launch the Currency Conversion Assistant.

Once the Currency Conversion Assistant launches, simply select the transaction date, choose the foreign currency, and enter the transaction amount. The converted amount will automatically be calculated based on the conversion rates for that date. Finally, click the ‘Use this amount’ button, and the system will populate the cost field with the converted amount.

The currency exchange rates used by the Currency Conversion Assistant are updated hourly based on aggregated data from reputable financial institutions, including central banks and international commercial banks. For optimal accuracy, it’s advisable to cross-check exchange rates with other sources, as market conditions can cause slight variations between providers.

Keeping Track of Your Giveaways at Events

You can track your giveaways (like swag and raffle items) at tradeshows by adding them under the event “Giveaways” tab.

Calculating the Cost of Giveaways Based on Asset Costs

When creating a Capital Asset or a Collateral/Multi-quantity item (in the “Manage Assets” area), you have the option of specifying the base cost for the Asset. Once an asset is reserved for an event (under the event Asset Reservations tab), that reservation can then be tagged in your Giveaways.

For example, if you have an Asset called “Company Logo Pen” with a cost of $1.00 per pen, and you reserve 500 of them for an event (via the Asset Reservations tab), you can then create a Giveaway (under the Giveaways tab) and tag that reservation in the giveaway. Once an asset reservation is tagged in a giveaway, the cost of the asset is displayed and you can use that cost to enter the cost for the giveaway.

Setting a Budget for Giveaways

You can enter your planned budget for giveaways at an event under the “Giveaways” section of the event “Budget” tab.

Actual Costs for Events

Actual costs for a given event can be viewed under the “Actual Costs” section of the Event “Budget” tab.

Actual Costs for a given event are automatically complied based on the following:

Booth reservation cost (as entered under the “Booth” tab)
Booth service costs (as entered under the Booth Services section of the event “Booth” tab)
Attendee registration/ticket costs (as entered under the event “Staff” tab)
Travel reservation costs (as entered under the event “Travel Reservations” tab)
Shipment costs (as entered under the event “Shipments” tab)
Miscellaneous expense/credit costs/amounts (as entered under the event “Misc. Expenses & Credits” tab)
Sponsorship costs (as entered under the “Sponsorships” tab)

Actual Costs for all Events in a Given Year

Actual costs for all events in a given year can be viewed and downloaded under the “Actual Costs Details” section of the “Annual Budgets (all events)” page.

Tracking Event Attendee Registration Information

You can track event registration information for your staff who attend your events (under the “Registration / Ticket info” section when adding an attendee via the event “Staff” tab).

Pro-tip

If you have already committed to an event (i.e. purchased tickets, etc.), but you don’t know who’s going to attend yet, you can still create an “untagged attendance record” (by simply adding an attendee record without actually choosing a particular person in the Attendee dropdown). Once you determine who’ll be attending, you can come back and edit that record to tag the actual attendee.

Quick-Tag Attendees

With just a few clicks, you can quickly tag attendees under the Event Staff tab. Use the dropdown menu (to the right of the “Add Attendee” button) to open the Quick-Tag dialog, then select the Attendee(s) you’d like to tag and click “Apply”.

Planned Budget for Attendee Registration / Tickets

You can enter your planned budget for Attendee Registration under the “All Attendee Registration/Tickets” section of the Event Budget tab.

Charging Expenses to Cost Centers

You can now charge expenses for your trade shows and exhibits to Cost Centers in ExhibitDay.

Cost Centers

Cost Centers are Departments or Business Units within your organization to which costs can be charged (for accounting purposes).

When entering the cost of specific items for your Events (e.g. Booth Reservation, Travel, Shipments, Sponsorship, etc.), you can optionally specify the Cost Center(s) that the cost should be charged to.

Configuring Cost Centers in your Workspace

You can manage your list of Cost Centers under Workspace Settings > Workspace Customizations > Customize Cost Centers.

Manage Cost Centers for Trade Shows and Exhibitions

Charging a Cost to a Cost Center

To specify a Cost Center to charge to (when entering the cost of an item), click the ‘Specify Cost Center’ link next to the text-box for the cost, then select the Cost Center you would like to charge the amount to.

Select the Cost Center to allocate a cost to

Charging a Cost to Multiple Cost Centers

If the amount being entered should be charged to multiple Cost Centers, use the ‘Split Amount’ link to specify the Amount/Cost Center breakdown. For example, if the total amount for an item is $750, and that amount should be charged evenly across three Cost Centers ( ‘CC1’, ‘CC2’ and ‘CC3’), enter $250 and select ‘CC1’, then, click ‘Split Amount’ and enter $250 and select ‘CC2’; do the same thing for ‘CC3’…

Split Expenses Across Multiple Cost Centers

Expenses by Cost Center Report

To view a report of your annual expenses broken down by Cost Center, click on the Annual Budgets (all events) link in the top-right navigation menu. Then, click on the Expenses by Cost Center tab.

You can filter the report by Cost Center and export all expenses (for the budget year) to a spreadsheet (in .csv format).

Trade Show Expenses by Cost Center Report

Note: The ability to specify Cost Centers for expenses is only offered to ExhibitDay Workspaces that are on the ‘Enterprise’ plan. If you wish to enable this feature, please contact us about setting up a custom Enterprise engagement with your organization.

Sign up for a free ExhibitDay account to plan your trade shows, manage your trade event budgets, and collaborate on tasks with your event team.

Category: Budgeting