Crowdfunding calculator

In the run up to our planned Kickstarter of Lovecraftesque, I’ve been busily crunching numbers to make sure that the whole thing will fly financially. All of our figures have gone into a spreadsheet, where I can easily update the costs as I get better information, and tweak the prices of the rewards to reflect those costs. In turn the spreadsheet works out how much we need to ask for.

Anyway, having gone to the effort of creating it, it seemed like other people might find it useful. If you give it basic information about your crowdfunding campaign (like reward levels, costs and so on), it will work out your reward levels for you.

I’ve included instructions on how to use it (at the top and in comments on the relevant cells). In brief: fill in the yellow bits and then read off the information in the green bits.

Crowdfunding calculator

Crowdfunding calculator

Josh Fox

Rabalias grew up wanting to be a pirate. But a band of evil bureaucrats kidnapped him and forced him to work for The Man. Even so, Rabalias was patient and cunning. He escaped by gnawing his way through the walls of his prison and concealing the hole behind a picture of cthulhu. He fled to the coast, and stowed away on the Black Armada, where he worked his way up to the rank of Admiral.

2 thoughts to “Crowdfunding calculator”

  1. Thanks! Useful tool.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t find where this accounts for expected taxes.

    1. Thanks for the comment, Colin – and it’s a good point. I can’t include tax, because it will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; not just the rate, but the basic rules which tell you how you work out tax.

      For example in the UK you’d get taxed on three things: income you pay yourself from the kickstarter, profit accrued by the company (if applicable) and the sales themselves.
      – I would handle income as a “fixed cost”, a figure you’re going to pay yourself, and which you can increase with your stretch goals. You can take tax into account in how much you want to pay yourself, if you want to.
      – Sales tax is a percentage of the total take, so I’d roll it in with the crowdfunding platform fee.
      – I would suggest treating tax on profit in a similar way to income. If you plan to make some profit at a given reward level, include it as a fixed cost item, and take tax into account if you like. If you get a runaway campaign and make way more profit than expected as a result then this won’t work, but that’s a nice problem to have.

      I have no idea if that will cover the taxes in your part of the world – maybe there are taxes that aren’t covered by the above. You’d have to decide for yourself where in the spreadsheet you’re best to put them, or whether the spreadsheet will even work for you.

      Hope that’s helpful!

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