When your venue hosts an event, you often provide more than just the space. You provide tables, chairs, AV equipment, staff, food and beverage, and much more — all the goods and services that support the event. Managing those goods and services in Momentus Elite allows you to enter the information one time and then be able to:
- Communicate event information to the departments that deliver the services
- Know if items for the event have been over-allocated
- Communicate event expectations to your client and bill after the event
- Report across time on your inventory usage, including cost to your venue, how often items are used, and more
Elite allows you to create a library of your inventory, their stock levels, and their prices. You then use this library to add those items to your events as needed.
You will find all of this on the Inventory & Prices page. To get there:
- Click your name in the upper-left corner and select Inventory & Prices.
You'll land on the Inventory tab, with the Price Schedules, Instruction Sets, and Setup tabs right beside it.
Inventory
All the items which you use to execute your events are organized in your Inventory.
Departments
The first step in organizing your inventory is to create departments. Departments represent the teams that are responsible for specific event information or manage specific inventories. While these departments might match your org chart, they do not need to. Your document templates can use the departments to group and filter an event's items, instructions, and charges. This is useful for proposals, contracts, event orders, and BEOs, for example.
For step-by-step instructions to create your departments, see Create Departments.
Categories
Within each department, you will create categories to hold your items. For example, for a Food & Beverage department, you can create categories for:
- Continental Breakfast
- Buffet Breakfasts
- Lunches
- Receptions
- Salads
- Dinners
- and more
When you create a category, you will assign it to a revenue stream. The revenue streams were created by your System Admin during the account setup process and should match how you report revenue in your venue.
For step-by-step instructions to create your categories, see Create Inventory Categories.
Items
Once your categories are created, you can add all of your items. Create Inventory Items walks you through that process.
What if things change?
- If you no longer have an item, or if a menu is no longer being offered, inactivate the item. Inactive items can no longer be used but will not be removed from any events where they are already in use. If you copy an event which has an inactive item, that item will not be copied.
- If items are still in use but you don't wish to have them available for certain types of events or for exhibitor ordering, you may remove those items from specific price schedules. This allows those items to be used for events which use a different price schedule.
- If an entire category is no longer needed, you may inactivate it. Inactivating a category does not affect events which already have items in that category applied, but you won't be able to add any additional items from that category. If you copy an event with those items, they won't be copied to the new event. You cannot delete categories, only inactivate them.
- If an item needs to be in a different category, you can move it.
- In inventory categories, you can change the category type: event services, food and beverage, or labor.
Category types determine:
- the units available to the items within the category.
- whether the item has just quantity or quantity and unit.
- food and beverage filtering on event orders that allows you to only pull in items that are in the F&B category types.
For more details, see Change Category Type.
Setup
The Setup area will give you the opportunity to create GL codes, taxes, and services charges. You will apply these to your items as you add prices.
For more information:
Pricing
Once your inventory library is built and any needed GL codes, taxes, and service charges have been created, you will add standard pricing for all of your items as well as rental rates for the various rooms in your venue. Your prices are organized into price schedules. A price schedule is a rate sheet, where you enter the costs (internal expense of an item) and prices (external/what you charge the customer) of inventory items, rental rates, service charges, taxes and other fees. You could have just one, or you could have several. Common price schedules are:
- Standard
- Non-profit
- Internal (often used on university campuses where university clients are charged differently than external rentals)
- Each year: Standard 2025, Standard 2026, and so on (this allows you to set pricing for future events without changing pricing for current events)
- Exhibitor (used by exhibitors to order items for their booths during trade shows, etc.)
Events can have more than one price schedule. You can have a price schedule that holds all of your rental rates and ancillary items, and have separate prices schedules for food and beverage since those options and prices change more often, and are also often managed by a separate department. Note that while an event can have inventory items added from different price schedules, all rental rates on the event must be from the same price schedule.
For details on creating price schedules, please see Create a Price Schedule.
Once you've created a price schedule, click it to start editing.
From here, you can add the items and rental rates to the price schedule. The cost (for items) and price (for both items and rental rates) will be applied to each event when you add the items to the event, but you are able to override them, if needed. Also, be sure to only add the items which should be available for events using a particular price schedule.
For more information:
You're now ready to start detailing your events! Do you have additional questions? Contact us.
Updating an Event after Changes to a Price Schedule
When you add items to your price schedule, all the information from the price schedule (cost, price, GL codes, taxes, and service charges) is "stamped" on the event. This means that if you make changes to a price schedule, events using that price schedule will not be changed. Most of the time this is a good thing, but there are times you may wish to "refresh" events after updating your price schedule. To do so, you can click the refresh refresh icon next to the price schedule on the event's details page. For full directions, please see Update an Event after Changes to a Price Schedule.