Film festivals run on more than screenings and red carpets. Behind every lineup is a finance question that gets harder every year a festival grows: who's owed what, and how do you prove it?
For Cedar Valley Film Festival, that meant tracking ticket revenue, sponsor contributions, and filmmaker royalties across dozens of screenings, then trying to reconcile all of it by hand before payouts went out. One missed line in a spreadsheet could mean an underpaid filmmaker or an awkward follow-up email months later.
Cedar Valley wanted its finances to be as organized as its programming.
Every Screening, One Ledger
With CUR8, Cedar Valley Film Festival could manage its finances in the same system that handled ticketing for every screening. Instead of exporting sales data into a separate spreadsheet and hoping the totals matched, revenue from each film's showings rolled up automatically as tickets sold.
That meant the festival always had an accurate, current answer to the question every filmmaker eventually asks: how did my screening do?
Royalties Without the Reconciliation Headache
Royalty payouts used to be one of the most time-consuming parts of the festival's post-event work, matching attendance numbers to contracts, double-checking math, and following up when something didn't add up. With ticket and revenue data already organized by film and by screening, calculating what each filmmaker was owed became a matter of pulling a report instead of rebuilding one from scratch.
Payouts went out faster, filmmakers had confidence in the numbers, and the festival's small finance team got its December back.
Sponsors and Stakeholders Get a Clear Picture Too
Festivals answer to more than filmmakers. Sponsors, board members, and city partners all want to know how the event performed. Because Cedar Valley's financial reporting lived inside the same platform as its ticketing and scheduling, pulling together a clean post-festival report took a fraction of the time it used to.
Instead of stitching together numbers from three different tools, the festival could show, clearly and quickly, exactly where revenue came from and where it went.
Built for Events That Answer to Many People
Royalties, sponsor reporting, and box office reconciliation are the kind of behind-the-scenes work that never makes the highlight reel, but it's what keeps a festival credible year after year. Cedar Valley Film Festival's finance team found that when ticketing and financial reporting live in one place, that trust gets a lot easier to earn.
If your event, festival, or program is still reconciling revenue by hand, see what a single system can do at CUR8.