Staff, and what a night costs

An act's fee is rarely the biggest thing a night costs. Staff and costs is where the rest of it goes, so what a night actually cleared is something you can look at rather than assemble in your head afterwards.

The roster

Add the people who work your room — sound engineers, door, security, bartenders, servers, hosts, cleaning, or anything else — then put them on nights.

• A shift is paid a flat fee, or hourly at a rate times hours.
• An hourly shift with no hours entered yet cannot be priced, so the night's total is shown as a floor until you fill them in — never as though that person cost nothing.
• Anything else the night cost — hire, cleaning, a broken glass rack — goes in as a night cost.

What the night cleared

The night's takings, less what the act cost you — their fee plus whatever they ran up on the house tab — less staff, less the other costs you recorded.

These are event costs only. Rent, utilities and stock sit outside it, so it tells you what a night contributed, not what the business made.

The same inputs answer the other half of the question before the night rather than after it: what it has to take to cover itself. That sits on the date's own page — see break-even and how a show is selling.

The house tab

If you offer acts food and drink at a discount, set the standing offer once in your booking defaults and record what each act actually ran up. A band on $400 who eats and drinks $180 at the house rate cost you $490, and over a year of Fridays that gap is real money that never appears on paper.

What this deliberately is not

• Not payroll. No tips, no rotas, no time clocks, no availability.
• No tax identifiers. No SSN, no EIN, no W-9. Year-end prep needs a total paid, which the roster works out for you; the identifiers belong wherever you file the forms.
• Not visible to your booking agents. What your staff are paid is no more their business than what the door took.