Working as a booking agent

To sign up as a booking agent, choose Get started on the home page and then follow “Booking agent? Sign up here” at the bottom, and give your organisation's details. An admin approves the account before you can work — until then you can sign in and see the dashboard, but not send anything.

Finding and connecting with bands

1. Browse bands on the platform and star the ones you want to keep track of.
2. Request a connection with a band, or approve one they request with you.
3. Once connected, you can see the dates they are trying to fill — and offer them a date at any room you book for.

Favourites are private to you, and you can keep your own notes against each one.

Bands that are not here yet

Use Invite a band to send a signup link to an act you already work with. When they sign up through it, the connection with you is set up as part of joining, so there is no second approval step.

Booking for venues

As well as representing bands, you can be approved to book for a venue — including venues nobody has claimed. See Representing a venue.

To book a band on RunABand into a date, you need an approved connection with slot requests enabled. That is the band's standing consent, and it is why a band you have not connected with does not appear in the picker.

Holding, offering, and your commission

• Hold a date for an act while they decide. Holds always expire, so a date never quietly disappears from the room's calendar.
• Offer a date to a band you are connected to. It asks rather than books — they accept, and that confirms it.
• Free that night lists connected bands who marked the date open, quietest calendar first, so you know who to call.
• Record your commission on a date: a percentage of a flat fee, or what you actually took.

Your commission is yours and the band's. The venue never sees it — it comes out of the act's fee, and what the room pays is the fee either way. On a night that pays the act a share of the door, the venue's takings are not shown to you, so there is nothing to take a percentage of; enter what you were paid once you know it.

Your week, and your book of business

• Your week — every date you can work, across every room, with what is waiting on you counted first. Dates reserved for another agent are not shown, because they are not yours to work.
• Your bookings — what you booked across every venue and what you earned on it, by year and by venue.

The total on Your bookings leaves out any date whose commission isn't known yet, and says how many. A night that pays the act a share of the door is the usual reason — the venue's takings aren't shown to you, so there is nothing to take a percentage of until you record what you were actually paid.

What you see on a venue's calendar

You work the calendar as a peer of the owner, but a room's trading figures are not part of that. You see one number: what an act was paid, and only on a flat fee.

• The venue's acts, as names, links and contacts — so you know who they book.
• No door, bar, food, headcount or spend per head, on any night.
• No staff costs, and none of the owner's notes on an act.

This is not a slight on agents; it is what makes venues willing to put real numbers in at all. See What each person can see.