What an event quote covers, and what it leaves out

An event quote covers four kinds of cost: what gets built, what gets brought in, who works on it, and the fee for planning and running the whole thing. Production, scenic and furniture sit in the first, AV and rigging in the second, crew and technicians in the third. Most quotes hold a contingency as well. Nearly every line you will ever read is a subdivision of those.

Which is why two quotes for the same brief can arrive far apart without either of them being wrong. They are pricing different amounts of work. The cheaper one is usually the one with gaps in it, and gaps do not stay gaps. They close later, on an invoice, at a price nobody negotiated.

What should a quote let you check?

Not the total. That is the least useful number on the page, because it says nothing about the assumptions behind it: how many crew, across how many days, against which drawing, in which room, and what has been quietly left out.

We itemise every cost on the quotes we send, whatever the format of the event. Read ours the way you would read anyone else's. If a line below is missing from something we sent you, ask where it went.

What does each line actually contain?

Open the line you are looking at. Each gives what usually sits inside it, what is usually left out, and the one question worth asking before you sign.

Which line moves most between the brief and the invoice?

Manpower, every time. It is the line tied most directly to time, and time is what an event actually spends.

Crew are quoted per crew-day rather than per hour, because you cannot book two thirds of a technician. A crew-day is a defined shift with a call time and an end, and how many of them you need is set by the shape of the day, not by the size of the build. Add a rehearsal the afternoon before and nothing about the stage changes, but a whole day of crew appears.

That is why a run of show belongs in the quoting conversation and not only in the final week. The document that says when things happen is the one deciding how many crew-days you are buying.

Overruns work the same way. A show that runs an hour long does not add an hour to the bill. It pushes the strike past the time the venue needs its room back, so the load-out happens the next morning instead: a second call for the same crew, and a second truck.

What is contingency actually for?

Not profit, and not a discount to be traded away when the total needs to come down. It is a sum held against what a live event will need that nobody can name yet.

What it gets spent on is rarely dramatic. A rigging point the building turns out not to allow, so the lighting goes on ground support instead. A replacement sourced overnight. A delivery that cannot reach the loading bay at the promised hour, so a second crew call covers the gap. None of that is bad planning. It is a plan meeting a building.

A contingency that quietly stays with the supplier when nothing goes wrong is not a contingency. It is margin with a friendly name.

So two questions settle it. Who is allowed to release it, and what happens to it if the event never needs it.

How do you compare two quotes that look nothing alike?

Put them on one list. Take every line from both, merge the ones that are the same cost under a different name, and leave a blank wherever one quote has nothing.

The blanks are the comparison. Go back to both suppliers with those, not with the total. Half the answers will be a version of "the venue provides that", which is worth checking with the venue itself. The room you choose decides more of a quote than the supplier does: who may rig in it, whether outside AV carries a levy, what time it has to be empty.

Once both describe the same event, compare them. They will often still differ, and now the difference means something: the price of the work rather than the price of an assumption.

None of this asks you to know what anything should cost. It asks the quote to say what it is buying. If it does, you can argue about the number. If it does not, the number is not the thing you are agreeing to.