WalkoutCheck

Idea

A mobile-first app that computes the exact amount a touring artist is contractually owed for a show and flags any mismatch against the promoter's settlement sheet before the artist signs off and gets paid. Tour managers and artist managers save the deal memo terms (guarantee, split percentage, comp allotment, approved expense caps) during the advance, and the app turns them into a live calculator the tour manager opens on their phone at the settlement table right after the show, instantly showing whether the promoter's numbers match. It is built to plug into existing tour logistics tools, not replace them.

Market gap

Tour management software (Master Tour, Artist Growth, Daysheets, Touring Pro, Tourseta) logs deal terms and lets a tour manager record gross, net, and expenses per show for record-keeping. None of them automatically compute what the artist is contractually owed and flag when the promoter's settlement sheet deviates from it. That check still happens by hand, at night, under time pressure, often on paper. Timing: the April 2026 Live Nation monopoly verdict and ongoing artist-advocacy campaigns (UMAW, Featured Artists Coalition) have put live-music financial fairness in the news, and thinner post-inflation club margins raise the cost of any single settlement error going uncaught.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up, from real sources plus stated assumptions:

• 11,030 US companies are classified as "Agents and Managers for Artists, Athletes, Entertainers, and Other Public Figures," an $18.5B industry (source: AnythingResearch/D&B industry report).
• Assumption (not directly sourced): about 25% of these, 2,758 companies, actively manage or book touring live-music or comedy acts doing 10+ ticketed shows a year, the segment that runs recurring box-office settlements.
• Assumption: each such company represents an average of 1.5 paying seats (an owner plus one tour manager), giving 4,137 agency seats.
• Plus freelance tour managers and artist managers who are not their own D&B-listed company, common at the club and theater touring tier: estimated at 1.5x the agency-seat count, adding 6,206 seats.
• Total addressable seats: about 10,343.
• At a blended $948/year per seat (mix of the Pro and discounted Agency tiers below): TAM is about 10,343 x $948 = $9.8M ARR.
• SAM: the realistic reachable segment is acts playing 500 to 5,000 capacity rooms, the club and theater circuit where settlements happen often but there is no in-house accounting staff. Estimated at 40% of TAM seats, 4,137 seats x $948 = $3.9M.
• SOM: a 1 to 3 person team relying on word of mouth and touring-community partnerships could realistically reach 5% of SAM in year one to two, about 207 seats x $948 = $196K ARR.

Monetization strategy

Direct SaaS subscription, billed to the tour manager, artist manager, or the agency covering their seats. The value proposition is concrete: the tool exists to catch money the artist is already legally owed under the contract, so the subscription pays for itself the first time it flags even one real discrepancy at a typical club-level guarantee. Retention comes from the tool becoming the standing habit at every settlement, not a one-time audit.

Pricing strategy

• Free: 1 seat, up to 3 shows tracked per month, full discrepancy flagging included. This is the entry point and trial.
• Pro, $79/month: 1 seat, unlimited shows, full settlement history and export. Anchor for independent tour managers and solo artist managers.
• Agency, $249/month: up to 5 seats, adds an agency-wide dashboard of flagged and resolved discrepancies across every managed act, seat administration. Anchor tier for small management and booking agencies, the natural upgrade path once an agency has more than one touring act.

Lead magnet

A free, no-login "Settlement Deal Calculator" web page: type in the deal type and terms (guarantee, split percentage, expenses), get the exact walkout number the artist is owed. It is the same core calculation the product does automatically from a saved deal memo, offered as a standalone free tool to pull in tour managers searching for exactly this math, with an offer to save the calculation and get discrepancy checking by signing up.

Social proof that the problem exists

• Show Settlement: A Beginner's Guide to Settling Concerts: a practitioner-written guide that lists the specific recurring dispute patterns a tour manager must catch at settlement: underreported ticket sales, inflated production expenses, missing comp ticket counts, incorrect tax calculations, and expenses that were never approved in the advance.
• Deal or No Deal: Navigating Booking Contracts & Settlements for Venues in 2026: a 2026 industry piece acknowledging that door deals create a real incentive for a promoter to under-report ticket sales, and that headliner contracts routinely build in a 12 to 24 month audit-rights window specifically because artists cannot fully verify the numbers in the room.
• Tour Accounting Invoice Processing: Settlement Workflow: describes the tour-accounting bottleneck directly: standardizing mixed-format settlement backup fast enough to catch missing documentation, disputed deductions, and late vendor charges before they harden into full settlement discrepancies.
• Tour accountant, Wikipedia: confirms "tour accountant" is an established, paid role whose core job is reconciling settlement sheets, guarantee payments, and expense backup against contract terms, evidencing that this reconciliation work is real, recurring, and today handled only by dedicated human labor that small and mid-tier touring acts usually cannot afford.

Competitors

• Master Tour (Eventric): the long-standing standard for tour logistics and advancing, with a financial module for logging gross, net, and expenses per show, but no automated check against the contracted deal terms.
• Artist Growth: an all-in-one touring and artist-career platform (positioned as a Master Tour alternative per its own comparison page) that tracks financial details alongside each date but does not compute or verify the contracted walkout amount.
• Daysheets: a modern day-sheet and tour-management app that lets a tour manager track "financial details and deal structures... alongside each tour date," again as a record, not an audit.
• Touring Pro / Tourseta: schedule- and logistics-first tour management tools (per Capterra) with minimal to no dedicated settlement-verification capability.

What competitors offer now

Every one of these tools is logistics-first: routing, day sheets, contact sheets, advancing documents, hotel and travel. Their financial features stop at letting a tour manager log what happened per show for bookkeeping and reporting. None of them store a deal memo as a set of contractual rules and then automatically compute what the artist is owed and compare it, line by line, against what the promoter actually presents. None are built mobile-first for the specific two-minute moment of settling at the venue.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Position as a narrow, single-purpose companion, not a replacement: import or re-enter deal memo terms already stored in Master Tour or Artist Growth, then be the app the tour manager actually opens at the settlement table. Distribute through the parts of the industry that already teach settlement math by hand, touring community and training groups like Tour Collective and the Tour Managers Association, plus musician and booking Facebook groups, using the free calculator as the entry point so the product is discovered at the exact moment someone is trying to do this math manually.