If you have been booking in Google Calendar, a spreadsheet or on paper, the year behind you is the thing almost every figure here needs and the one thing a new account does not have. Importing brings the dates and the act names across, so your acts, your baselines and your draw records have something to stand on from the first week.
It is on the Acts page, at the top. Nothing is written until you have seen exactly what it would do.
What it will read
- An .ics export from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or anything else that speaks the standard calendar format. The event's title becomes the act name and its description becomes the date's notes.
- A CSV, where a date column and an act column are the only ones required. Start time, end time, event type and notes are used if they are there.
- Column headings are matched loosely, so “Start Time”, “start_time” and “start time” are all the same column, and act, artist, band or performer all name the act.
- A date with no time of day lands at whatever start time your booking defaults use.
Dates are read as YYYY-MM-DD first, and otherwise as American month-first — so 04/03/2025 is the 3rd of April. A first number over twelve can only be a day, and rather than quietly switching to day-first for those rows the file is reported so you can re-save the column. Importing a year of bookings a month out is far worse than being sent back to a spreadsheet for two minutes.
Preview, then commit
- Upload the file, and say what kind of nights these were — ticketed or no cover — for any row that does not name its own type.
- Read the preview: what will be booked, which names matched acts you already have, which are new, what was skipped and why, and anything it could not read at all.
- Import. The file is read again from the same bytes you uploaded, so what you were shown and what gets written cannot drift apart.
Names are resolved against your acts exactly the way the booking picker resolves them, so a spelling you already have lands on the act you already have rather than starting a second, empty history for the same people.
Act names are taken exactly as written. Stripping “Live Music:” or “ — SOLD OUT” is precisely the guesswork the act roster exists to end: a cleanup rule that is right nine times out of ten produces a tenth spelling nobody typed. Two rows that really are one act are a merge, which is a decision you make with both records in front of you.
What it deliberately does not bring
- No money at all. No fee, no deal, no door, no bar, no attendance. A calendar export knows who played and not what the night took, and a figure invented here would be indistinguishable from one you counted.
- No account link. An imported date files the act on your roster; it never claims they booked through the platform, because they did not.
- No repeating events. An entry that repeats is reported and skipped, because expanding it would invent dates your room may never have run — the same rule a residency follows.
- No nights with nobody on stage, and no private hires. The first is only worth having with the night's figures attached, and the second names a client rather than an act. Both are reported rather than quietly filed as a show.
What gets skipped, and why
- Already on the calendar under the same act — you have imported this file before. Running it again does nothing, which is deliberate: you will export a longer file next month and upload that too.
- That date and time already has a different booking on it.
- Not in the past — and today counts as future, because tonight's show is the most live booking there is. Future dates are off by default since they collide with holds and offers already out with bands. You can turn them on, and even then any future date the room is already using is left alone.
- The same date and time appears twice in the file.
- That night is settled. Its record is closed, and adding an act to it now would change how many acts the night had — which changes whose draw record it counts toward, months after everyone agreed what it was worth.
- You recorded that night as dark. Those nights are the yardstick every other night is measured against, and a date only counts as one if nothing was on it at all — so putting an act on it would quietly delete it from your baselines, and a month sitting on the three-night minimum would lose its baseline entirely. If the act really did play and the night was not dark, change the night itself; that is a correction to your own record rather than something an import should do behind you.
Everything skipped is listed by row, and so is everything that could not be read. Being told “180 imported” when forty were skipped would leave you believing you have a year of history you do not, and you would find out from a draw figure that is wrong.
Only you can import. It writes to your room's own record of who played, and there is no version of this screen for a booking agent working your calendar. One file at a time, up to about 250KB.