Ask a committee mid-festival what they have spent and you will get a confident number. Ask what they have committed and the room goes quiet. The gap between those two numbers is where festival budgets go wrong.
A deal is not a payment
When you engage the sound vendor at ₹40,000 and pay ₹15,000 as a booking amount, three separate facts now exist: the deal is ₹40,000, you have paid ₹15,000, and you owe ₹25,000. Most registers record only the middle one. That is how a committee arrives at visarjan believing it has ₹60,000 in hand, when ₹45,000 of it is already promised.
Track deal, paid and balance — always all three
Every vendor should have those three numbers visible at any moment, and the balance should be the one you look at when deciding whether you can afford the extra lighting. In Kosh, engaging a vendor records the deal amount, each part payment updates paid, and the balance due is computed for you rather than remembered.
Committee advances are the same problem, indoors
The ₹10,000 handed to a committee member for pooja samagri behaves exactly like a vendor advance. It has left the box, it is not yet an expense, and it resolves only when the bills and the balance come back. Track who holds how much of your money, and settle each person against their bills. A committee where every advance is settled is a committee with nothing to argue about.