Tag: Trade Show Budgeting

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.

Annual Budgets and ROI Calculations for Your Trade Shows in Spreadsheet Format

You can now Export the Annual Budgets, Analytics and ROI Metrics for your trade shows to Excel (.xlsx spreadsheet format).

How To Export Budgets and ROI Metrics to Spreadsheet

Click on the Annual Budgets (all events) link in your ExhibitDay Workspace. Then, click the [Export to Excel] button under the [Allocation Breakdown] and [Analytics & ROI Breakdown] tabs to export to .xlsx format.

Example Spreadsheet Exports

Sign up for an ExhibitDay account and start tracking the budgets for your trade shows and exhibits.

How to Allocate your Annual Event Budget Across your Trade Shows and Sponsorships

ExhibitDay’s new budgeting feature lets you set annual trade show budgets as well as more granular, event-specific budgets across all your trade shows for the year.

In this post, we will cover how you can allocate your annual budget across your events in ExhibitDay.

Your Annual Event Budget

Your total annual budget is pretty straight forward — it’s the total budget you have for exhibiting at trade shows, plus, your sponsorship budget.

Allocating Budget to an Event

Once you’ve entered the events you are considering for the year in ExhibitDay and you’ve set your total annual budget, it’s time to allocate that budget across your events.

Event-Specific Budgets

Under the [Budget] tab for each event, you can enter the planned budget for the event’s booth reservation, services, travel/lodging, shipments, miscellaneous expenses, and sponsorships. As you enter these numbers, the total planned budget for the event is automatically calculated in the summary section.

The Allocation Summary Box

The budget allocation summary box shows the total event budget in relevance to the total annual budget for all trade shows and sponsorships. As you enter the budget for each event, this is where you’ll get a lens into how much of the annual budget remains unallocated (or how over-allocated the annual budget is).

Event Allocation Breakdown 

After you have allocated your annual budget to all your events, you can go to the [Event Allocation Breakdown] tab of the annual budget page to see the details of how the budget has been allocated.



Sign up for a free ExhibitDay account and start tracking the budgets for your trade shows and exhibits. 

Tracking Miscellaneous Expenses in your Annual Events Budget

Based on user feedback, we just released new functionality to track non-event-specific miscellaneous expenses in your annual budgets. These are trade show and exhibit expenses that are incurred against your annual event budget that cannot be attributed to a single event — for example: new booth furniture, or, updated print brochures.

You can manage your miscellaneous annual expenses under the [Other / Miscellaneous Expenses] tab of the Annual Budgets page in ExhibitDay.


Create a free ExhibitDay account and start tracking the budgets for all your trade shows, exhibits and sponsorships.

Trade Show Budget Tracking

Just launched — the ability to track budgets and actual costs for your trade shows and sponsorships in ExhibitDay.

This new enhancement helps you get a better lens into your investments in exhibits and event sponsorships and gives you more clarity when planning for future events.

Like most things in life…

“If you can measure it, you can make it better.”

Event-Specific Budgets

Under the Budget tab of each event, you can now enter the planned budget for the exhibit booth, services, travel reservations, shipments, sponsorships, and other/miscellaneous expenses.

Event-Specific Trade Show Budget

Event Budget Summary

The planned and actual sums are automatically calculated in the top summary section:

Planned Budget Summary

Entering Actual Costs

A new “Cost” field has been added for:

  • Booth Reservation (under the event [Booth] tab)
  • Booth Services (under the event [Booth] tab)
  • Travel Reservations (under the event [Travel] tab)
  • Sponsorships (under the event [Sponsorships] tab)
  • Other Expenses (under the event [Other/Misc. Expenses] tab
Cost Field

Use the newly added “Cost” field to specify the actual cost for each expense. The costs that you enter get aggregated into the actuals under the event Budget tab.

Annual Budgets

We also added the ability to track annual budgets (for all your trade shows).

Annual Trade Show Budgets

Under the annual budgets tab, you can set your overall annual budget for your Exhibits as well as your event Sponsorships. The actual costs are automatically aggregated from the values you enter in the “Cost” fields of all your events for the year.

Access Control

You have the ability to control which users in your ExhibitDay workspace have access to view and update costs as well as budgets.

Budget Access Control

Sign up for an ExhibitDay account and start tracking the budgets for your trade shows and exhibits.