iplicit plays its part in success of Edinburgh International Festival

It’s the event that established Edinburgh as the UK’s festival destination, drawing thousands of performers and tens of thousands of audience members to the city each summer.

Edinburgh International Festival has recognised the key supporting role played by cloud accounting platform iplicit since 2022.

Edinburgh’s original festival

The festival, which runs until August 25 this year, involves nearly 200 events spanning classical music, contemporary music, dance, opera and theatre. Founded in 1947, it is run by the Edinburgh International Festival Society, a registered charity.

It is a separate entity from the city’s Fringe festival and is curated by its organisers, who contract the artists and sell the tickets. This year’s festival is the second under director Nicola Benedetti, the world-famous violinist.

A 2022 study found Edinburgh’s line-up of festivals was worth £407m to the city’s economy and £367m for the rest of Scotland.

In a case study interview last year, Andrew Brownlie, Head of Finance for the International Festival, told how the organisation spends around three-quarters of its £12m-£13m turnover in just three months. Most parts of the festival spend almost nothing until the summer.

The finance team moved from Sage 200 to iplicit’s accounting software largely to improve reporting as well as to enjoy the efficiencies made possible by a cloud-based system. It was important for the team to have real-time information about each event in the festival.

Andrew said:

“We can pull that information out early enough now to be usable. Otherwise, when everyone’s so frantic trying to deliver the festival, getting them to pay any attention to it is difficult.

“At the point when you’re spending most of the money, that’s when you most need accurate, up-to-date financial reporting, which is what iplicit now gives us. Budget holders can see their expenditure live in the system.”

Time savings and better data

iplicit’s automation features have saved the festival’s finance team around two days’ worth of work each month. Tasks such as payment runs and bank reconciliation take a fraction of the time they did before.

iplicit enables that all-important monitoring of the festival’s economic impact, ready for reporting to funders and stakeholders.

When the performances are over and the festival team is reviewing how things went, iplicit makes that process easier and better informed.

Andrew concluded:

“We pull out some of that information and use it to try and inform some of the programming decisions for the next year.

“We can have a coherent conversation about it, using numbers that we are confident in. That will really help us in years going forward as we build up that history. That was one of the key reasons for the switch to iplicit.

“We’ve been happy to recommend iplicit to other people who are looking at it. I’m more than happy to say that I think iplicit is a good option that they should be considering.”

Read more about the Edinburgh International Festival in iplicit’s full case study.