Everything in the box

Every feature, grouped by the part of the job

The overview makes the argument. This page just answers “does it do that?” — including the rules about who can see what, because on a venue’s books those are features too.

Nights

Not every night is a show, and each kind is recorded honestly.

  • Ticketed nights — a door charge, revenue splits allowed, headcount counts as the act’s draw.
  • No-cover nights — no admission; the bar and kitchen carry the room. Flat fee only.
  • Private hire — someone rents the room. Never offered to bands, and the guests are the host’s.
  • Dark nights — open with nobody on stage. These become the yardstick every other night is measured against. Optional: a room that never has one is measured against its own average instead.
  • Recurring patterns — generate the nights your room actually runs, weeks ahead.
  • Event type is correctable — set it wrong and fix it later without losing the night.
  • Rule A private hire never gets a per-head figure. Ten weddings at 120 guests must not sit in an act’s history as a 120-head average.

Money in

What the night took, split by where it came from.

  • Door, bar and food — recorded separately, because only some of it says anything about the act.
  • Room hire and deposits — what a private hire paid, tracked from quote to received.
  • Ticket tiers — advance, door, VIP, whatever you sell. Price is copied onto the sale, so a later change never rewrites past ones.
  • Walk-ups on the door — one or two at a time, from a phone, landing on the door figure immediately.
  • Per-act ticket attribution — tickets an act sold themselves, which is the cleanest measure of a real following.
  • Attendance and comps — with spend per head and door per paying head derived from them.
  • Ticket pacing — where a show’s advance sales sit against your own comparable nights at the same point in their run, while there is still something you can do about it.
  • Rule On a ticketed night the door is computed from the ticket lines and can’t be hand-entered, so the split basis and the sales can never disagree.
  • Rule Pacing won’t call a show until it has three comparable nights, measures against the middle of them rather than the average, and leaves walk-ups out — they don’t exist until the doors open.

Money out

What the night cost, including the parts most rooms don’t count.

  • Flat fees and revenue splits — with the payout computed and tracked to paid.
  • Hospitality — the house tab, added to what the act cost you.
  • Staff costs per night — sound, bar, floor, door and security, hourly or flat.
  • Other night costs — anything else the evening ran up.
  • Break-even before you book — what the night has to take once the fees, the shifts and the other costs are on it, and how many paying in that comes to. An act with no deal agreed yet gives you what the night costs before any fee, which is what it can carry.
  • True margin — what the night cleared once everyone was paid.
  • Act budgets — what you mean to spend on acts each month, with spent and committed kept apart.
  • Settlement lock — settling a night freezes what anyone is owed; marking someone paid still works after.
  • Nights still owing — unsettled nights surface on their own, oldest first.
  • Rule A revenue split that hasn’t settled counts as cost unknown, never as zero — guessing would make a budget most wrong on the nights that went best.
  • Rule With no dark nights recorded that month there is nothing to hold a break-even figure up against, and it says so rather than implying the room draws nobody on its own.

Your acts

A private record of everyone you book, on the platform or not.

  • Act roster — every act you’ve booked, with contacts, links and your own notes.
  • Your own tags — what kind of act this is, in your words. “Trad session”, “80s covers”, “brunch”, “loud”; the suggestions are what you’ve already typed here, so the room’s vocabulary settles without anyone agreeing it centrally.
  • Works without accounts — most acts most rooms book don’t have one, and they still accumulate a history.
  • Roster-first booking picker — searches acts you’ve already booked before anything else, which is what stops a fourth spelling of one name.
  • Import past bookings — an .ics export from Google Calendar, or a CSV of dates and act names. Names resolve against the roster as they land, so three spellings arrive as one act rather than three rows to merge afterwards.
  • Preview, then commit — you see exactly what would be created, matched and skipped before anything is written, and running the same file twice writes nothing the second time.
  • Merge duplicates — fold two records into one; every night moves across and both sets of notes are kept.
  • Archive — off the picker, history intact. Booking them again brings them back.
  • Invite an act to sign up — their booking history connects to the new account.
  • Sell-through, self-sold tickets, spend per head, consistency — per act, from your own settled nights.
  • Season-adjusted draw — 70% of the room in a dead January beats 70% in a packed July, and the ranking knows it.
  • Rule Signing an act up hands them an account, never your books. The takings on nights they played stay yours.
  • Rule An import carries the calendar and never the money. A calendar export knows who played; it has no idea what the door took, and a figure invented on the way in would sit in an act’s per-head next to ones somebody actually counted.

Filling dates

Booking is a maybe, a pencil, a phone call, and eventually a yes.

  • Holds — pencil a date for an act. Every hold carries an expiry and reopens on its own.
  • Offers — send a date to a band and let them answer. Accepting books it, confirmed both sides.
  • Requests from bands — they ask for a night; you answer.
  • Free that night — acts you’re connected to who published that date as open, quietest calendar first.
  • Saturation warnings — how heavily an act is already playing the same market, from their own calendar and published tour dates.
  • Residencies — “every third Thursday until June” in one action; books what’s free and reports what it skipped.
  • Multi-act bills — a support slot on the same night, with the running order and what the night commits in total.
  • Worth a call — the acts who drew above a normal night here and have been away longest, ranked by what they were worth weighted by how long it’s been. Everyone left out is counted and explained, so a short list doesn’t read as “you have nobody”.
  • Booking pace — how full each upcoming month is against the share your own history says that month comes to, weekday by weekday, because a Friday and a Tuesday in your room are not the same night.
  • Rule Saturation names no venue and exposes no other room’s calendar — only counts and distances.
  • Rule Acts with no figure yet get their own list rather than the bottom of the ranking. “We don’t know what they drew” and “they drew nothing” are different statements, and only one is fair to put against a name.

Show day

The three weeks before, and the four hours of.

  • Advancing — load-in, soundcheck, doors, set time, backline, hospitality, parking, who to call.
  • Saving and sending are separate — filled in over three weeks; the act sees it when you send it.
  • The act’s own link — a page for their one date, no account needed, where they can write back.
  • Booking confirmations — their fee in writing, accepted in one click, snapshotted at send time.
  • Guest lists — names against comps, with an allowance for the act and a tick as each one arrives.
  • Tonight — what’s on across every room you run, built for a phone at 7pm.
  • The door screen — running order, who’s working with a button to call them, the list, walk-ups, settle.
  • Rule The advance carries no money of any kind. That’s what lets the venue, the act and the engineer all read one record.

Staff

What a night costs in people — and no further.

  • Staff roster — sound, bar, floor, door, security, with default rates.
  • Shifts per night — each keeping the rate it was created with, so changing someone’s rate never rewrites past pay.
  • Sound engineer logins — their own schedule, their own pay, the tech notes for the act they’re mixing.
  • Shift cover — another engineer on your roster picks it up without phoning you.
  • Staff calendar feeds — each person’s own shifts, subscribable on their phone.
  • Year-end totals — what each person was paid across the year.
  • Rule No payroll, no tips, no time clocks, and deliberately no tax identifiers — those belong wherever the forms are filed.
  • Rule An open cover request shows no rate. Until it’s taken it’s still another person’s recorded pay.

Knowing your year

Two years of nights, turned into an answer.

  • Season ratings — how each month of the year actually goes, in your judgement.
  • Measured draw — what the room really did, laid over your ratings so the two can disagree.
  • Accounting import — type monthly totals off a report and the trend line exists today, not next year.
  • Coverage — how much of a month this system actually saw.
  • Baselines from dark nights — what an ordinary night takes, so a no-cover crowd can be split from the act that drew it.
  • Contribution over baseline — what an act added to a normal night, reported even when negative.
  • Ranking without a dark night — if the room is never closed with nobody on stage, acts are measured against your own average for that month instead, as a multiple rather than in dollars. No-cover nights are compared only with other no-cover nights, never with ticketed ones.
  • Rule The two comparisons are never blended or added. Dollars over an empty night and a multiple of your own average answer the same question in different units, and each is labelled with which one it is.
  • Rule A full room on a no-cover night never counts as a sell-out. Some of that crowd was coming anyway, and crediting it to the act would rate every band well at a room the kitchen fills on its own.
  • Dates that behave differently — the 26th of December, the Saturday of a long weekend, the weekend the festival is on: each measured against a normal night that month, and sitting beside your season ratings so the two can disagree.
  • What each night was worth — a year of settled nights ranked by what the acts cost against what the night took over a normal night, both directions. A night with no dark night that month behind it, or a split that never settled, is held apart as unmeasurable rather than scored as returning nothing.
  • Payout reports — per night and per act, exportable as CSV or PDF.
  • Rule Nights settled here and figures from your books are never added together — a month’s accounting total already contains its nights.
  • Rule A date with one year behind it is labelled as one year and sorts below every established pattern, however dramatic that year was. One good Boxing Night is a story, not a rule.

Working with others

Agents on your calendar, without your books.

  • Representing agents — approved to work your calendar without owning the listing.
  • Date allocation — hand specific nights to a specific agent, or leave them in a shared pool.
  • Agent’s own week and reports — across the rooms they represent, built from their own book of business.
  • Venue calendar feeds — the whole room’s calendar, subscribable.
  • Bands and agents get free accounts — included with your subscription.
  • Rule An agent sees what an act was paid on a flat fee, and nothing else about the money. Never the door, the bar, the food, the staff costs or the budget.
  • Rule Revenue splits are withheld from agents entirely — a split payout divided by its percentage would hand back the door.
  • Rule Break-even, ticket pacing, booking pace, your tags, the date records and what each night was worth have no agent version at all. They aren’t hidden on a shared screen; the screens don’t exist on that side.

Start with one room and one month

Settle four nights and the picture starts forming. Upload the calendar you’ve been booking in, and type last year’s totals off an accounting report, and it forms immediately.

Get set up Back to the overview