A dancer in four routines is counted four times
Marching band circuits, dance and cheer competitions, choir and orchestra festivals and speech tournaments all bill the same way: on bodies and on routines, both, at every stop of a season that runs the same performers past you again and again.
What a competition or circuit usually rents
The weekend needs four or five separate products, and almost none of them know what the others hold, which is why the schedule is retyped.
Counted per routine, counted again per performer
Count what actually gets billed. A group routine is one entry, and the performers in it are counted again individually, so the same child in four routines appears on the invoice four times over. Studios and schools do not enter one at a time either. A director signs up a whole competitive squad at once, and the figure the platform charges on is routines multiplied by bodies, not the number of families who paid you.
Then the season restarts it. Every regional stop is a fresh set of entries for largely the same performers, and the championship at the end of the circuit charges on them one more time. A studio that follows you all season is billed at each stop, and so are you, for work the platform did once when the routine was first registered and has copied forward ever since.
Adjudication is priced separately again, per event or per tablet, for software that runs on a handful of weekends and sits idle the rest of the year. The labour hides in the joins. When entries, the running order and the scoring live in three products, somebody retypes the schedule into the tabulator on the Friday night and reconciles a scratch by hand while the first session is already on stage.
What we rebuild for a circuit
- Studio and school accountsA director enters every routine and every performer under one login, with one balance and one payment, and the breakdown by performer still visible underneath.
- The running orderBuilt from routine lengths, stage resets, age and level divisions, warm-up room rotation and the gap a performer needs between two costumes, and rebuilt when a studio scratches.
- Adjudication on tabletsCaption scores and recorded comments per judge, held locally when the hall has no signal, totalled the moment the last panel submits, published when you release them.
- Circuit standingsResults roll from every stop into season standings and into qualification for the championship, using your own rules for drops, ties and eligibility.
- Doors, programmes and mediaSpectator admission sold in advance and at the door against the same event, with performance video and photos ordered from the entry record they belong to.
What stays rented
- Circuit or association membershipWhere an association registers schools, studios or performers for eligibility, insurance or national ranking, that membership is the network and it stays. We send it what it asks for.
- Card processingThe processor charges the same whichever system takes the entry fee or the door ticket.
- A theatre that insists on its own box officeIf the venue requires admission to be sold through its own gate, that contract wins and we build the entry side around it.
The running order is the hardest thing you build
A performing arts competition is a constraint problem wearing a timetable. A dancer needs enough routines between her solo and her group number to change costume. Ensembles need the stage cleared and reset. Warm-up rooms have to rotate so nobody stands cold in a corridor, and divisions have to stay together for the judges. Rented schedulers mostly hand you a list to drag by hand, which is why the person who builds your order does it over several evenings in the weeks before.
It is also the thing most likely to change on the morning. A studio arrives two routines short, a soloist is unwell, a session runs long. A system built around your own rules can rebuild the order from those same rules, tell the affected directors, and push new times to the stage manager, the tabulator and the doors at once. That is work worth owning, because at the moment it is done standing up, on a clipboard, by a volunteer.
Questions circuits and competition organisers ask
Studios pay for their dancers, not the dancers. Can one invoice cover a whole squad?
Yes, and it is usually the first thing we build. The studio or school is the account: the director enters every routine and performer, sees one balance and pays once, while the split by performer stays visible so they can recover it their own way. Independent entrants can still register themselves without a studio.
Will judging work in a hall with no wifi?
It has to, so the tablets keep the session they are scoring and submit when they reconnect. A judge sees only their own captions and comments, the tabulator sees totals as each panel lands, and nothing reaches the public until you release it. Judge recruitment, availability and payment can sit alongside the scores rather than in a spreadsheet.
Can we still sell admission at the door?
Yes, from a phone, against the same event that holds the entries, so a session's audience and its performers are in one place. Whether an advance ticket carries a fee on top becomes your decision rather than a platform's, although the card charge itself is still the processor's and applies either way.
We run one competition a year. Is custom software too much?
Often, yes, and we would rather say so than sell you something. A single event with a modest field is usually cheaper to rent than to own. Add a whole season up first, including every stop's entry fees, the adjudication licence, the door fees and the media share, with the calculator on this site. If the total is small, stay where you are.
Keep reading
Send us what a season of entries costs
The per-entry fee, roughly how many routines and performers a stop, and what your scheduler still does by hand.
Hiro costs about a tenth of what you pay now, quoted against your own bill. Hosting, fixes and changes included, and no per-seat fees.