Your own gig records: what a working musician should keep, per gig
The few things worth writing down after every gig (date, venue, fee, your own miles, expenses, who paid you) and the habit that makes January painless.
It is the second week of January. Somebody (your accountant, your partner, or just you at the kitchen table) needs to know what you earned playing last year and what it cost you to do it. You have a bank app, a phone full of photographs, four WhatsApp threads and a memory of a Tuesday in Shropshire that you cannot date.
That is the January problem, and it is not a tax problem. It is a records problem that happened in April, May and June, when every gig was perfectly clear in your head and nobody wrote any of it down.
This is the small habit that fixes it: what is worth keeping for each gig, where each figure actually comes from, and how to do it in the two minutes after you have put the gear in the car. It is written for a working player (somebody in a couple of bands who also deps) not for whoever does your books. What any of it means at the end of your year is their question. Having it at all is yours.
Why the bank statement is not a record
Most players assume the bank has done this job for them. It has not.
A bank line says a band paid you on a Friday in May. It does not say which gig, whether your travel was in it, whether it covered two gigs or one, whether the car park you fronted came back, or that the other band owes you for a Saturday in April and nobody has noticed.
Worse, it only has the gigs that were paid. The gigs that were agreed, played and then quietly never settled are invisible in a bank statement, because the whole point of them is that no money moved. Those are exactly the ones a record is for.
The seven things worth writing down
Short enough to do on a phone, in the car park, with the engine running.
- The date. The gig's date, not the date you were paid. Everything else sorts by it.
- Who you played for. The band's name, and if it was a dep, whose band it was. "Dep for the Saturday band" is not a name you will recognise in March.
- Where. Venue and town is plenty. It is what makes the gig recognisable to you later, and it is the thing your brain actually stores.
- What you were paid, and by whom. The amount agreed, and whether it came from the band, from a bandleader personally, or straight from a client.
- Your round trip, from your own postcode. Not the band's van route, not the mileage somebody else claimed: the distance from your front door to the venue and back. See travel and mileage for how bands usually handle it.
- Anything you paid out. Parking, a train, a taxi from the station, the strings that broke in the second set, the hotel. One line each, with a photograph of the receipt.
- Whether it has arrived. The single most valuable column, and the one everybody leaves out. Agreed, invoiced, paid.
That is it. Seven short entries. Nothing in that list needs a decision, an opinion or a calculation, which is exactly why it survives contact with a Saturday night.
Where each figure actually comes from
The reason this is usually hard is that the figures live in four different places, owned by four different people.
Your fee comes from the band. If your band issues a statement for the month, that document is the better record of the two, because it is the band's own arithmetic rather than your reconstruction of it. Keep it. A statement that names your share, your travel and any expense that came back to you does most of this job for that band's gigs, and if yours does not break it down that way, there is a fuller account of how the money is meant to work in how band members get paid.
Your travel is yours to know. Whoever works out mileage in your band is doing it from the postcode they have on file for you, at the band's own rate per mile, and they are doing it for the band's purposes. Your own record of the journey you actually made is a separate thing and you are the only person who can keep it. The long version of why it matters is claiming mileage as a UK musician.
Expenses come from the night itself. Photograph the receipt in the car park. Which costs a band pays back and which stay with you is a decision somebody else makes, and band expenses: what gets paid back walks through it, but the photograph has to happen before you leave.
Anything you invoiced for comes from you. A private function, a session, a bandleader who wants paperwork: your copy of that invoice is a record of the fee, the date and the fact that you asked. If you have nowhere to make one, the musician invoice generator is free and produces a PDF without storing anything.
The gigs that are easiest to lose
Four kinds, every time, in roughly this order.
The gig you didn't play. A dep covered you, the band paid you as usual, and you paid the dep. Two payments, neither of which explains itself six months later. Write who covered you and what you agreed to pay them at the moment you book them: what a dep actually costs you is the arithmetic in full.
The dep you did for somebody else. One night, one band you are not in, often one informal bank transfer with no paperwork on either side. These are the rows most likely to be missing entirely, because no band's statement will ever list them for you.
The gig that moved. Rebooked from March to June, half the band different, the fee renegotiated. Record it under the date it was actually played, and note that it moved, or you will find it twice.
The gig nobody paid for. It was played, it was agreed, the money never came and you did not want to be the person who kept asking. Six months on, the only reason you remember is that you have a row with "agreed" still in the last column. That column is how a polite reminder gets sent while it is still an oversight rather than an argument.
One list, not one per band
The temptation is a list per band, because each band feels like a separate world. Resist it.
Every question you will be asked about last year is organised by date or by total, never by band. A single list sorted by date gives you both. It also shows you something no per-band list can: that one band paid within a fortnight every single time and another is three gigs behind. You will not spot that in two separate documents.
Put the band's name in a column and keep one list. A spreadsheet is fine. A notebook is fine. The format matters far less than it having everything in it.
The habit, in two minutes
- In the car park, before you drive: photograph any receipt. Ten seconds, and it is the part that cannot be reconstructed.
- The same night or the next morning: date, band, venue, fee, round trip, expenses, and "agreed" in the last column.
- When the money lands: change "agreed" to "paid". This is the whole reconciliation, done one line at a time, all year.
- Once a month: read the last column only. Anything still saying "agreed" from more than a month ago is a conversation to have this week.
Four habits, none of which takes longer than making a cup of tea. What they buy you is that January is a half hour of reading rather than a weekend of archaeology, and, now and then, finding money that was never actually paid.
Where this lives, if you use the app
Event Band Manager keeps most of this for you for the bands that use it. Every gig you played or depped out is on your own diary with its date, venue and line-up; your statement for the month names your share, your travel worked out from your own postcode and any expense that came back to you; receipts are attached to the gig they belong to rather than living in your camera roll; and a dep you booked carries an I've paid them marker, so settled is a recorded fact and not a feeling.
What the app cannot do is know about the band down the road that still runs on a group chat. For those, the seven-column list is still yours to keep, and the two sit together perfectly well, because they are both organised by gig.
There is more on the player's side of all this on for musicians, the full picture on features, and if you want to see how a fee turns into the shares and travel on a statement, the band gig pay split calculator is free and stores nothing.
Start tonight, with tonight's gig. A year of records is not a project; it is one row, once per gig.
See it in the app. Gigs, everyone's travel worked out from their own postcode, an equal split to the penny and a statement each at the end of the month: free for a band running itself.