Planning a comprehensive event budget usually involves hours—or even days—of digging through spreadsheets, researching historic costs, and manually calculating city-to-city comparisons.
With Aletheia’s Budget Playground, you can compress that entire process into less than 20 minutes. Instead of starting with a blank screen, you start with a data-driven foundation. This feature is designed to do the heavy lifting for you, setting you on the right path immediately so you can focus on the strategic decisions that make your event a success.

From Concept to Cost: Build Your Budget from an Event Vision

The Value: Don't let financial planning stall your creativity. This specific pathway allows you to translate your high-level "Event Vision" into a line-item budget instantly. It ensures your financial strategy is perfectly aligned with your creative goals from day one.

Before You Begin

To use the Budget Playground, please ensure the following:
Active Event: You must be working within an existing Event in Aletheia.
Event Brief: Ideally, fill out the Event Vision and Event Description in your dashboard’s Event Brief section.
Note: If you haven’t done this yet, don’t worry—you can enter these details directly within the tool using our AI assistance.

How to Build Your Vision-Based Budget

Follow these steps to generate a professional budget in minutes:
1. Access the budget playground: Navigate to the global menu within your event and click on Budget. If this is your first time, select the Budget Playground option (Option 2).
2. Select Your Method: Click on "Budget from an event vision." This launches a 3-step wizard to guide you through the process.
3. Define the Details
Step 1: Event Snapshot Review the prefilled Event Type, Vision, and Description. Use AI assistance to fill these in if they are missing.
Step 2: Event Basics Review prefilled details like dates and attendees.
Pro Tip: You can select up to 3 different cities here. Aletheia will generate a side-by-side budget comparison for all selected locations, saving you hours of regional research.
Step 3: Budget Direction Choose your spending level (Standard, Premium, or Luxury) or select Custom to manually input percentage allocations for each category.
4. Generate: Once you have finished the steps, click to generate. Aletheia will process your vision against historical data and present you with detailed budget scenarios instantly.

Take Charge: Refining Your Budget

Once the budget is generated, the power is in your hands to fine-tune the details to match your event's unique needs.
Managing Categories
Add/Delete: Customize the line items to match your specific requirements.
Adjust Sub-categories: Drill down into specifics and remove items that aren't relevant.
Live Updates: As you change dollar amounts within a category, the total budget updates automatically.
Smart Regeneration
If your event scope changes (e.g., new dates or attendee counts), you can Regenerate the budget.
Retain Edits: When prompted, choose to keep your custom categories and percentage allocations. Aletheia will apply your unique structure to the new data, ensuring your hard work isn't lost.

Explore the Market: Marketplace Estimates

Once your budget is refined, Aletheia helps you visualize how those numbers work in the real world. For each city in your comparison, you can search for Venues, F&B providers, and AV vendors that fit within your allocated budget.
A Starting Point: These results provide a list of available options that align with your budget levels.
Estimates Only: Please note that these are estimates meant to guide your thinking and are not finalized prices.
Planner Due Diligence: While these results serve as a great starting point to see what is available, planners should conduct their own research and contact vendors directly to ensure accuracy and availability.

Saving and Exporting

Once you are satisfied with your budget plan, you can save your progress or take it offline for stakeholder reviews.
Saving: Click Save to store your current version in the Budget Playground.
Downloading: Export your budget in several formats for easy presentation and sharing:
PowerPoint (.ppt) & Google Slides
PDF & Word (.docx)