What replaces a function band's admin spreadsheet?

A bandleader sits down on a Sunday night with the spreadsheet open and a cup of tea going cold. Three tabs: the diary, the money, and a copy of the agency's sheet that needs checking against the real one. The money tab has a formula in it that nobody else understands. Somebody in the chat has asked what they are owed for last month, and the honest answer is "give me an hour".

If that is your band, the answer to the title is short. The replacement is one place that holds the gig, who is playing, each player's travel and the split, and shows every member their own figures. The rest of this is what that means in practice, and how to get there without a bad month in between.

What was the spreadsheet actually doing?

It is worth listing the jobs before you replace anything, because a spreadsheet usually does four of them at once and nobody wrote the list down.

The gigs. Date, venue, times, the fee, who booked it. Often with a column for status, so a pencilled date can be told from a confirmed one. A TBC in the notes column is the spreadsheet's way of keeping the diary honest.

The availability. Who can do which night. Sometimes a tab, more often a column of initials, and more often still nothing at all, because it lives in people's heads and in the chat.

The money. The fee, what came off, each person's travel, the split, and whether anyone has been paid. This is the tab with the clever formulas, and it is the tab only one person trusts.

The agency's sheet. If your work comes through an agency, they keep a sheet of dates and send it round or share it. Most bands end up copying rows from it into their own, by hand, every time it changes.

None of those is a bad idea. The trouble is that all four are held together by one person's patience.

Where does it break?

Not on day one. A single careful person and a four-piece band can run on a spreadsheet for years. It breaks in ways you only see later.

One owner. The sheet works because one person understands it. When they are away, ill, or simply sick of it, nobody else can find the right cell. The knowledge was never in the sheet. It was in the owner.

No history. Overwrite a figure and the old one is gone. Somebody asks why March looked different from what they were told, and there is no answer, only a different number than the one you remember.

Nobody else can see their own line. To show a member what they are owed, the owner has to send a screenshot, a copy, or a message. So every question about pay is a small favour, and members stop asking, which is worse than asking.

The group chat around it. The sheet holds the facts and the chat holds the arguments about them. The call time is in one place, the correction to the call time is in the other, and the person who needed the correction was not looking at either.

The sums are only as good as the last edit. A formula changed for one awkward gig stays changed. Nobody notices until two people compare their numbers and they do not match.

None of this is carelessness. It is what happens when a record has one writer and many readers who cannot read it. That is also the clue to what the replacement has to be.

What does the replacement have to do?

Here is the list, plainly, and it is shorter than you might expect. It is also roughly what Event Band Manager does, in its own words.

• Every gig in one diary. Venue, times, line-up and notes together, with directions and the day sheet a tap away, and the gig in each player's own calendar.
• Who is playing, and who is covering. A dep can be asked in a few taps, and their journey is worked from where they live, not from the member they are covering.
• Days off that every band sees. A player enters their own once, and the diary knows before you say yes. The longer account of that is in how bands stop double-booking themselves.
• The split, to the penny. Travel off the top from each postcode, the rest divided equally, and a statement each, frozen once it is approved. The reasoning behind the order is in how function bands split gig money.
• Each member sees their own figures. Not the whole band's books, and never a manager's cut, but their own pay, their own travel and their own statement, without having to ask anyone.
• Songs and setlists, and a way to read it with no signal. Venue car parks are where phones give up.

If a tool does those and does them the same way every time, it has replaced the spreadsheet. If it does something clever and misses one of them, you will be back in the sheet by Christmas.

What stays on a sheet?

The agency's, and that is fine.

An agency's booking sheet is how they tell you about work: dates, venues, offers that may or may not firm up. It is theirs, they will keep sending it, and trying to get them to stop is not a fight worth having. What you can stop is retyping it.

The sensible arrangement is that the sheet is connected rather than copied. The gigs come across when it changes, a pencilled date shows as TBC until it firms up, and everything the agency cannot know (the line-up, who is driving, the money) is added to the gig on your side. Your record and theirs agree because one of them feeds the other, not because somebody was careful on Sunday night.

It also means a change to a date does not depend on the one person who spots it. Whoever opens the gig next sees the new time.

How do you move without losing a year?

Slowly, and not all at once. The mistake is treating the move as a migration project. It is a change of habit, and habits move at the speed of the slowest member.

1. Leave the old spreadsheet alone. Do not delete it, do not tidy it. It is the record of everything before the switch, and it is read only from now on.
2. Choose a boundary. The first gig of next month, or simply the next gig in the diary. Everything from there is in the new place.
3. Bring across what is still ahead of you. Confirmed dates first, then the TBC ones. If an agency's sheet feeds your work, connect that instead of typing it.
4. Set up the band and invite the players. One link each. The first thing a member should see is their own next gig, not a tutorial.
5. Run one gig all the way through. Add it, play it, approve the statement, look at it together. That single gig will show you what you got wrong faster than any amount of planning.
6. Keep the old sheet open for a month, then close it. If anyone is still checking it, you have found the member who was never told.

You are not losing a year. You are drawing a line under it, and leaving it exactly where it was.

If you are still setting the band up and have not yet decided who holds what, how to start a function band lists the decisions worth making before the first paid gig, so the new place starts with the answers already agreed.

What does it cost?

Members pay nothing. A band can stay on a free tier for good, and the paid tiers are per band and add extras rather than unlocking the basics. The details are on the pricing page, and nothing in this post depends on them.

The real cost of any replacement is attention: an evening to set it up and a gig or two of everybody getting used to it. Compared with the Sunday nights you are already spending, that is the cheap option.