Your acts

Plenty of the acts a room books will never have an account here, and they still need to be somebody rather than a name typed afresh each time. Acts is your own record of everyone you book, and everything they do in the room collects against it.

That is what makes a history possible at all. Without it, three spellings of one name are three different acts, and none of them has a record worth reading.

How an act gets on the list

By being booked. When you book a date, the picker searches your own acts first, then bands on RunABand you have not had yet, then offers the name you typed as a new act. Searching your own list first is the point — it is what stops a fourth spelling of a name you already have.

If you have been booking somewhere else, you do not have to type the last year of it in. Importing a calendar you already have brings the dates and the names across in one go.

What an act's page shows

• Every night they played here, with the headcount, the spend per head, and what they cost you all in.
• Averages, and how they do against what your room normally does in the months they play.
• Contacts, links, and your own notes.

All of it works for an act with no account. That is the whole point of it.

What kind of act this is

Tag an act with whatever you would actually say about them — trad session, 80s covers, loud, brunch, sit-down. It is free text with suggestions rather than a list somebody else picked, because every room's vocabulary is its own and a central one would be wrong in most of them.

The suggestions are your own previous answers, ranked by how often you have used them and offered in your own spelling. So the vocabulary settles down on its own without anybody having to agree it up front, and no other room's tags reach yours.

• Rock and rock are one tag. Your capitalisation is kept for reading; the filing does not care about it.
• Paste a list separated by commas or line breaks and it splits it up, so a column out of a spreadsheet goes in as one paste.
• Twelve to an act. Past that you are describing them rather than filing them, and notes already have a field.
• A merge keeps both acts' tags, not only those of the act you keep, because both rows carry your real judgement about the same people.

Tags are yours the way your notes are. A booking agent working your calendar can neither read them nor add them.

Worth a call

The roster answers who you book. Worth a call answers who to ring this week: acts who drew above a normal night here, ranked by what they were worth and weighted by how long they have been away. An act who put $1,400 over a normal night five months ago is a call you meant to make, and a list sorted by name will never show it.

• Acts already on a future date here are left out — that call has been made.
• Acts who played in the last six weeks or so are left out. A list of people to chase should not lead with whoever was on last week.
• Archived acts are left out, because archiving means keep them out of the picker and this is the picker by another name.
• Acts measured as taking more than they brought are left out. That is a real result, and it is not a call to make.

It always says how many it left out and why, so a short list explains itself instead of reading as “you have nobody worth booking”.

Acts the room has no figure for get their own list rather than the bottom of the ranking. “We do not know what they drew” and “they drew nothing” are different statements, and only one of them is fair to put against somebody's name. A figure needs settled nights in a month where you also ran three or more nights with nobody on stage. Without those there is nothing to measure anybody against, and the whole list stays short until there is.

An act away about eighteen months or more comes with a line suggesting you check they are still going. Your records say what happened; they are not a promise that everybody in them still has a working number.

Duplicates

They happen. Open the duplicate, choose the act it is really the same as, and merge. Every night moves across to the act you keep, along with any contact details and links that one was missing, and both sets of notes are kept with a line saying where the merge came from.

Nothing about those nights changes — the fees, the takings and the headcounts stay exactly as they are. But a merge cannot be undone, and two acts linked to different accounts on the platform can never be merged, because whatever they are called they are two different bands.

Residencies

“Every third Thursday until June” is one decision and used to be twelve identical bookings. Choose the act, the day, how often, and how far ahead to go, and it books them into every date that matches.

It only books dates that are already on your calendar and still free. It will not create nights — which evenings your room runs is a separate decision, and a residency inventing dates would put shows on evenings you are shut.

It always tells you how many it skipped and why. Booking twelve when four were already taken and saying “twelve booked” would leave you believing you have a residency you do not. Up to twenty-six dates at a time.

Acts you stop booking

Archive them. They come off the booking picker and keep every night they played. Book an archived act again and they come straight back — putting somebody on a date says plainly that they are back.

Bringing an act onto the platform

If an act has an email address on file and no account, you can invite them. When they sign up, everything you have already booked them for connects to their new account, and you get to see how busy they are elsewhere before you offer them a date.

Signing up gives them an account, not your books. The door, the bar, the food and the headcounts on the nights they played stay yours.