A gig fee, from the booking to what lands in each account
No jargon and no assumed knowledge. If you have ever argued about fuel money in a car park at one in the morning, this page is for you.
Who is who
A band
The thing gigs belong to. It has people in it, a fee for each booking, and a mileage rate of its own. Everything else hangs off a band.
A member
Somebody in the band. They keep their own gigs, travel, expenses and pay — and can see how the band’s share was worked out, because a split nobody can check is not a split anybody should accept.
A dep
Somebody covering for a member on one gig. They see that gig and nothing else. They travel from their own address, and the money follows.
A manager
Somebody who books and runs the band from outside it, and takes a cut of the fee for doing so. A band can have one, or share one with other bands, or have none at all.
A self-managed band
A band where one of the members does the admin instead of an outside manager. There is no cut — the whole fee is the band’s.
The money model, in one sentence
The fee comes in, the manager's cut comes off if there is one, everyone's travel comes off next and goes back to them, and what is left splits equally.
The fee
What the client or the agency is paying for the booking.
Minus the cut
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 step entirely.
Minus travel
Everyone's round trip, from their own postcode, at the band's mileage rate. It comes off the pot and goes straight back to whoever drove it.
Split equally
What remains is divided evenly between the people who played, to the penny. Each person is then paid their share plus their own travel.
The same thing with round numbers
Invented figures, chosen because they divide neatly. Nothing here is anybody's real fee.
| The band is booked for | £2,000 |
| The manager's cut comes off first | −£200 |
| Band pot | £1,800 |
| Everyone's travel, added up, comes off next | −£300 |
| Left to share between five players | £1,500 |
| Each player's equal share | £300 |
Then each person gets their own travel back on top of that £300. The player who drove two hundred miles is paid £300 plus their own mileage; the one who lives round the corner is paid £300 plus almost nothing. Their travel money is theirs, not a share of a pooled pot — which is exactly why it comes off before the split rather than after it.
If nobody manages the band, step two does not happen and the whole £2,000 is the pot. If a manager does, their cut is never shown on a band's screen or a band's statement — a band sees its own fee, its own pot and its own split, and that is all.
What a statement is
A statement is one person's month, in one document. Every gig they played, their share of each, the travel that came back to them, and any expense they were reimbursed — with a total at the foot that is what they are actually owed.
While it is a draft it moves. When it is approved, the figures freeze: the mileage rate used, the distances, the shares. That is the moment it stops being a working-out and becomes a record, and everyone on it is told.
If something turns out to be wrong afterwards it is corrected rather than rewritten. The corrected statement supersedes the old one, the old one stays readable, and the difference is carried into the next month rather than quietly disappearing. That is the whole reason it is worth having instead of a spreadsheet tab.
How a dep gets paid
When somebody covers, they become the person travelling. Their round trip is worked out from their postcode, not from the member they are standing in for — which is often a completely different journey and is the single easiest thing to get wrong by hand.
The band pays the member, as it always did. The member settles with their dep. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation: the band has one relationship to account for instead of a new one every time somebody cannot make a Saturday, and the dep deals with the person who asked them.
Where a shared sheet fits
Plenty of agencies keep every band's bookings in one shared spreadsheet, and plenty of bands will keep working that way whatever anybody builds. So a band can connect that sheet and let gigs arrive from it: new bookings appear, changed ones are updated, and anything ambiguous is shown as a conflict for a human to settle rather than silently overwritten.
If you have no sheet, nothing is missing. Add a gig in ten seconds and everything downstream — travel, splits, statements — works exactly the same.
What we never see, and what you can always take
We do not run ads, we do not sell data, and there is no third party being fed your band's bookings. Your data is held on servers in London, and every company involved in running the site is listed in plain English in the privacy notice.
You can download everything — every gig, every statement, every receipt — as CSV and JSON whenever you want, and you can delete your account yourself. Neither needs to be asked for.
That is the whole model
If it matches how your band already thinks about money, the rest is just typing.