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  • 1.  Cross-event budget tracking

    Posted 12-10-2020 03:20
    Our organization wants to start tracking all event-related budgets in Cvent. While this is easy enough to do for direct spends associated to a single event, has anyone come up with a solution for tracking cross-event spends (e.g. licensing fees, agency fees not tied to an event, event infrastructure, etc.) as well?  One suggestion internally was to create a "dummy" event to capture those budget items. Thoughts? 

    Thx-
    Lisa
    #Flex-Creating/ManagingEvents

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    Lisa Armstrong
    Event Registration Program Manager
    Intel Corporation
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  • 2.  RE: Cross-event budget tracking

    Posted 12-16-2020 15:14
    Hey Lisa,

    We have this issue too with some of our big "bucket" line item spend that isn't associated to a particular event, but it still needs to be tracked and reported as overall spend against a given G/L code. We created a Custom Event Field called "Meeting Category" so that we could create the actual meeting types (internal, external) and then created a final answer called "Budget Item". This allows me to create an Event Record that I can clearly ID as a budget item, track the line item spend for the entire bucket of money, and still filter out those Event Records when I need to run a report solely on real events/meetings that we've managed. I'd be happy to show you or chat more about it if you'd like. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done right now!

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    Stacy Wright, CMP
    Senior Manager, US Congresses & Events
    Galderma Laboratories, L.P..
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Cross-event budget tracking

    Posted 12-22-2020 08:23

    Hi Lisa,

    I don't have a good answer for this, but really like  @Stacy Wright's answer. Stacy, do you also track travel expenses in this way? That's something that we currently don't even track as an event cost, and in my opinion, is a big miss in understanding the total event cost to then be able to track correct event ROI. Ideally, we would want to track travel, lodging and food all separately (I would rather have a lot of sliceable, diceable line items than one big bucket).



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    Lori Wildman
    Senior Marketing Manager
    DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Cross-event budget tracking

    Posted 12-22-2020 10:17

    Hey Lori - I agree with you and know this is something we are thinking about too, but since it doesn't affect our G/L codes and budget it's not a priority ... yet! For now, we are focusing on the fixed costs we can control and ultimately answer for each month. If we did, though, I'd have to think about whether we track them in our Event Record for Meeting ABC, which would not give me a clear picture of my G/L's actual, budgeted, negotiated spend (in my opinion), or if we establish a travel "child" Event Record for each meeting that tracks travel, hotel, and food as an aggregate spend but still has line items that allow for budget categories and subcategories so you have your data segmented and by vendor if needed. Not sure if that all makes sense!

    As we explore integrations with Concur, Veeva, and other software systems I think it's going to be an easier (and more automated) task so that we can really tell the story of spend in a robust way. 



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    Stacy Wright, CMP
    Senior Manager, US Congresses & Events
    Galderma Laboratories, L.P..
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    Original Message