Quiz night profit calculator

A quiz night with forty people in it looks like forty people's worth of trade. It is not, because some of those forty would have been in on a Tuesday anyway. What the quiz is worth is the trade it adds, so the calculator asks how many regulars you would have had without it and counts bar profit only on the rest.

The other common mistake runs the other way: counting the entry money and the prize and forgetting the bar entirely. For most pubs the entry fee barely covers the prize, and the bar is where the night pays for itself.

Everything below is per night, for a quiz that runs every week. Change any number. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

The break-even figure is the useful one. It tells you how many teams the night needs before it stops costing you money, which is the number to watch in the first two months while a quiz night builds.

If the night only works at a turnout you have never had, look at the running costs first. A weekly host fee is usually the largest of them, and it is the one a pub can most often replace with its own staff.

It does not count the slower value of a quiz night: the regular who now comes in twice a week, the team who book a table for a birthday, the Tuesday that becomes a fixture people plan around. Those are real and they do not fit in a calculator.

It also assumes a regular spends the same on quiz night as on any other night, which is usually an underestimate. If anything, the true figure is a little better than the one shown here.