Booking pace

Pace has its own tab, and it answers the question a fill rate cannot. “62% booked for October” is useless on its own — it only means something next to what your Octobers actually come to.

It will not tell you that you are behind

This is the part worth reading twice, because the figure looks like a warning and is not one. Your history is made of months that have already finished, so what you are compared against is where your Octobers END UP — a finishing line, not a checkpoint. A month that is still eight weeks away is supposed to have dates open.

So a forward month short of that number is the ordinary state of a calendar rather than a problem, and the page says where your months finish instead of calling you behind. Only the month you are already in gets flagged, because by then the finishing line is a fair comparison.

Telling you that you were “75 points behind a normal October” in August, when this room fills its Octobers in September, would be false — and a number you learn to disbelieve is worse than no number at all. Knowing where you should be on a given date needs to know when past dates were booked, which the app only started recording recently. See “How far ahead you fill” below.

Weekday by weekday, always

A room's Fridays and its Tuesdays have completely different demand and completely different lead times, and one monthly percentage hides both. A room running six Fridays and two Tuesdays a month is not “50% booked” in any sense you can act on.

So every upcoming month is broken down by day of the week: what is booked, what your own history says that weekday in that month usually comes to, and how many nights are held rather than sold.

• Held is counted apart from booked. A pencil is not a sale, and a hold runs out on its own.
• Nights you run with nobody on stage are out of the reckoning entirely. Going dark on Mondays is a decision rather than unsold inventory, and counting it would have you permanently behind on Mondays.
• A weekday your history says nothing about is left out of both sides of the comparison rather than quietly scored as a zero.

Three months before it will say anything

An expectation for a given month and weekday needs at least three past months behind it. Below that you get “no history yet” instead, on purpose: putting a booker under pressure against a number the app made up is worse than telling them there isn't one.

It is keyed on the month of the year rather than a specific month, the same way your baselines are. Every October is evidence about October, so a room with two years behind it has two Octobers to reason from rather than one.

How far ahead you fill

The sharper reading is lead time: you normally fill a Friday about sixty days out, and these three are inside that. It appears against a weekday once there are five bookings to work from, and it uses the middle one rather than the average — a single date booked eighteen months ahead would otherwise make every ordinary booking look late.

This one will be quiet for a while, and it cannot be hurried. Knowing how far ahead a date was agreed needs the moment somebody was booked into it, and nothing recorded that until this shipped. Bookings of bands with an account here were recovered from their own gig record; imported dates and older bookings of acts without one have nothing to reconstruct from, and a guess would be worse than a gap. The page says so rather than leaving the reading out without comment.

Only you see this. It is your open inventory and the way your room fills, which is not the business of the people negotiating with you for dates in it.