MONEY… It’s a Gas 🍓
The first full year of Coherent and heres a bit about the money
It’s April, my hard rocking fiscal amigos, which means it’s the end of the financial year and I get to talk you through our accounts. Calm down, I know it’s hot, just splash some water on yourself and let’s get down to business.
Put down the seven sided dice, the decoupage can wait, and please don’t open another bag of your Lego Starship Enterprise - let me indulge you instead.
Another year of Coherent Comedy and another year of your kind donations going to supporting online accessible comedy. One of the deals of doing this was to be as open as possible with how much we get and how much we pay our acts.
This is the first full year we’ve had so it’s difficult to do a comparison to the previous year but in general, we’ve had bigger audiences and more donations which means more money to the acts.
Bottom line, we received £1,413.78 in on-the-night donations across the year, an average of £128.53 per night which is about £39.71 more than 2024/25 (I say “about”). Worth noting that KoFi and some PayPal transactions take a percentage in fees so we miss out on a bit here and there. Nothing we can do about this I’m afraid, just a bit depressing when I add up the amount lost in fees.
We keep costs low and our show takings are split between the acts, meaning the more you donate the more we can pay. Regardless of donations we actually have a baseline level of payment and this is steadily increasing as the show gets bigger. We don’t advertise a fee for acts because we, maybe naively, hope people want to perform because it’s an enjoyable night rather than doing it for the wonga. The money is also split equally between the acts based on time spent on stage, so the headliner gets comparably the same as the other acts. We are aware that we don’t pay the same as some club nights (yet) but we hope it’s fair, transparent and you don’t even need to leave your house to perform. Again it comes back to having acts that actually want to be there.
To which ends we paid out £1,220 to acts last year, which is an average of £110.90 per month - but you can do the math (and realise it’s actually 91p if you round correctly, that was a test, congratulations those of you that passed, to be honest if you’re reading this, you probably passed). This means 86% of your donations go to the acts, last year it was 73%, hopefully we can increase again in 2026/27. I will also add: we pay within a couple of days of the show. The amount of comedians I see having to chase invoices is quite frankly abhorrent: it’s quite easy, you’ve all got banking apps on your phones - if you can book an act, you can pay them.
The remaining 14% pays for zoom and we try and keep a small amount back for the months where donations are lower. We also try and give a nominal amount for “tech” but they never accept so it goes back into the pot.
This year we’ve also expanded to merchandise (get a t-towel, they’re amazing) which is bringing in a little bit of cash (£61.61). We get a really small percentage of everything sold but it all helps and we’re hoping it will cover our annual zoom account this year.
Occasionally we get the odd donation outside of the show and we both put in an annual amount just to up the working capital and add to the rainy day fund. All this means we’re building up a nice little amount in the bank (Balance at year end £405.59) - of course our anxiety raises, worrying that we’re not paying acts enough, but we also want to make the show bigger and better so we can put more back into the acts. Website, podcast hosting, maybe a theme tune or two are things we’re considering investing in to try and grow the show - we’ve also got to save up for the inevitable in-person live show.
We’re still not sure if we’ve got this right so please let us know. Your feedback, insight and tits are always welcome pointers.
Chris & Hare 🍓