Edinburgh International Festival: iplicit plays its part in world-beating cultural event

The organisers use iplicit’s accounting software to handle the finances of an event that spends three quarters of its budget in three months of the year.  

In a case study interview last year, Andrew Brownlie, Head of Finance for the International Festival, gave an insight into the running of its finances. 

The impact of Edinburgh International Festival  

Founded in 1947, Edinburgh International Festival takes place over three weeks each August. It involves nearly 200 events, covering classical music, contemporary music, dance, opera and theatre. 

It is separate from the city’s Fringe festival and is entirely curated by its organisers, who contract the artists and sell the tickets. The International Festival employs 50 staff year-round, rising to around 200 in the summer.  

A 2022 study of the impact of Edinburgh’s line-up of festivals found they were worth £407m to the city’s economy and £367m for the rest of Scotland. For every £1 provided from the public purse, the festivals generated £33 in economic spend, the study found.  

The 2024 festival is the second under director Nicola Benedetti, the world-famous violinist, who says: “This year the Edinburgh International Festival celebrates Rituals that Unite Us as we inaugurate new and imagined rituals, in a programme that will bring artists and audiences closer together than ever before.” 

Live information for the finance team  

Edinburgh International Festival has an annual turnover of around £12m-£13m, around three-quarters of which is spent in three months. In fact, most parts of the organisation spend almost nothing until the summer. 

The finance team moved from Sage 200 to iplicit 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. 

“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,” said Andrew. 

“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.”  

Saving two days a month – and driving better decisions 

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.  

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

“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.” 

Find out more

Read more about iplicit’s relationship with Edinburgh International Festival in our full case study. 

And to find out more about how iplicit helps arts and cultural organisations, contact iplicit’s Senior Business Development Manager Luke McKenna, luke.mckenna@iplicit.com