Tickets, sponsorships and booths in the ledger

How tickets, workshop seats, sponsorship packages and exhibitor booths post to their own revenue accounts, from an accepted quote to an issued invoice.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Events businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.

An events business earns money in two very different ways. One is the audience: tickets and workshop seats, sold in their hundreds or thousands at modest prices. The other is the commercial side: sponsorship packages and exhibitor booths, sold to a handful of companies at much larger sums, usually after weeks of negotiation.

Those two streams respond to different pressures. A weak line-up hurts ticket sales; a weak economy hurts sponsorship budgets. If both land in one income account, the owner cannot see which stream carried the year and which let it down. The Events & trade shows pack in Achekam's Industry CRM keeps them apart in the ledger from the first invoice.

What the starter catalogue lists

Switching on the Events pack adds a starter catalogue of items the business can sell:

• tickets;
• workshop seats;
• sponsorship packages;
• exhibitor booths;
• booth extras, such as additional furniture, power or storage.

Every item arrives unpriced. The pack does not suggest what a ticket or a gold sponsorship should cost; those are commercial decisions, and they change from event to event.

Two revenue accounts

The same switch adds the pack's revenue accounts to the chart of accounts:

The starter items post to these two accounts. Open each item before your first invoice and confirm which account it points to, especially booth extras and workshop seats, which some businesses prefer to report differently. Agree the split with your accountant now, not at year-end.

Sponsorship in kind needs a word with your accountant too. A sponsor who provides drinks, transport or printing instead of cash still receives benefits, and how that exchange is recorded, and taxed, is a question to settle before the agreement is signed rather than after the event. For background before that conversation, ACCA's Revenue revisited walks through the IFRS 15 five-step model for recognising revenue from contracts with customers, including how the transaction price is determined.

If your existing chart already uses 4580 or 4590 for a different type of account, the pack refuses to switch on and names the account in the way. Your accountant can move it before you try again.

Acceptance drafts the invoice

Sponsorships and booths are usually sold by quote. In the Industry CRM, the customer accepts a quote on a link by typing their name and ticking a box, and that acceptance drafts the invoice in receivables.

That small step removes a lot of retyping. The invoice starts from exactly what the customer accepted, so the sponsorship tier, the booth size and the extras match the quote line for line.

A few safeguards come with it:

• Sent quotes are frozen. Once a quote has gone to the customer, it cannot be quietly edited; a change is made as a revision.
• The acceptance is recorded. The customer's IP address and browser are kept with the acceptance, which helps if anyone later asks who agreed.
• Issuing waits for authority. The acceptance drafts the invoice. Issuing it straight away needs an administrator's recorded authority; otherwise a person checks the draft and issues it.

Invoice lines that name the account

Each line on the invoice names the product it sells and the revenue account it belongs to. When the invoice is issued, it takes the next number in the sequence and posts to the ledger, with revenue split by account and, where a line sells a stocked item, its cost of sales in the same journal.

Here is a worked example in words. A company negotiates an exhibitor package: a booth, extra furniture and two seats at a paid workshop for its staff. The sales lead sends the quote, the company's manager accepts it on the link, and a draft invoice appears with three lines. After checking, the finance person issues it. The booth and the furniture post to Sponsorship and exhibitor revenue; the workshop seats post to Ticket revenue, if that is where your set-up points them. One invoice, two revenue streams, both visible in the month's figures.

Group bookings work the same way. A corporate client buying a block of tickets for its staff receives a quote, accepts it and is invoiced, with the tickets posting to Ticket revenue.

Gate sales at the till

This article is about invoiced sales. Tickets sold at a gate or box office go through the till, which posts its own journal at the moment of sale with each payment method to its own account. Ask your accountant which revenue account your till sales use, and whether gate sales should be reported together with invoiced ticket revenue.

Pricing the items yourself

Because the catalogue arrives unpriced, the first task after switching on is a pricing session for the next event:

1. Set ticket and workshop seat prices, including any early-bird or group rates you use.
2. Price each sponsorship tier and each booth size.
3. Price booth extras, so sales staff stop improvising.
4. Confirm each item's revenue account with your accountant.
5. Confirm the VAT treatment of each item for your country.

What the split shows you

After one event, compare the two accounts. Ticket revenue shows how well the programme drew an audience; sponsorship and exhibitor revenue shows how well the commercial team sold the event to companies. Set against your costs, covered in keeping vendor spend inside the event budget, that tells you where the next event's effort should go. Deposits on these invoices are handled as described in why the till needs full payment, and the tills for gate sales in pop-up tills and floats for an event.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.