Why we built Event Band Manager

Every band that gigs for money eventually has the same argument, usually in a car park at one in the morning. Somebody drove a hundred and forty miles and somebody else lives round the corner, and the fee has just been divided by five.

That is the thing worth getting right, and it is why this exists.

The order matters more than the maths

A gig fee is not one number divided by the number of people in the room. The order the money comes off in decides who is subsidising whom.

1. The fee is what the client or the agency is paying.
2. If a manager books and runs the band, their cut comes off first. What is left is the band pot. A self-managed band skips this entirely.
3. Everyone's travel comes off next — each person's round trip from their own postcode, at the band's own mileage rate — and goes straight back to whoever drove it.
4. What remains splits equally between the people who played, to the penny.

Each person is then paid their equal share plus their own travel. The player who drove two hundred miles gets the same share as the player who walked, and their fuel on top. Travel money is theirs, not a share of a pooled pot, and that is exactly why it comes off before the split rather than after it.

Deps are where it breaks

Plenty of tools can help you find a dep. The hard part is afterwards. A dep travels from their own address, not from the member they are covering, and that is usually a completely different journey. The band pays the member; the member settles with their dep. Nobody should have to remember which way round it went three months later.

And then it has to stand up

At the end of the month each person needs a statement: every gig, every mile, every reimbursed expense, and a total. Approved, so the figures freeze. Correctable without lying about history, so a mistake supersedes the original rather than overwriting it.

A spreadsheet can do the sums. It cannot do the record.

How the whole model works