expert.band for managers and agencies

A manager running three acts has three sets of musicians, three repertoires, three calendars and one inbox where every enquiry lands. The bands do not care about each other's logistics, but the manager needs to see all of it, answer availability questions in hours, and send quotes that look like they came from a professional office rather than a phone at midnight.

This is how expert.band is set up for that job: what the manager role can do, how several bands sit on one account or across several, and the honest limits.

Two ways to organise it

expert.band is organised around bands. A band has exactly one band leader (the account that is billed for it), any number of managers and any number of members. Roles are per band. That gives a manager or agency two models.

Model A: the agency owns the bands. The agency account creates each band and is its leader. One subscription covers all of them: 3.90 € or $ a month for the first band plus 2.00 for each additional band, prorated automatically when a band is created or deleted. The agency sets band settings, pays, and can transfer a band to a musician later if the relationship changes. This suits agencies with their own house acts.

Model B: the musicians own the bands, the manager is invited. Each band leader (usually the musical leader) subscribes for their own band and invites the manager with the manager role. The manager sees and does everything in that band except billing, deletion and transfer. The manager's own account pays nothing for those bands. This suits freelance managers and agencies representing independent acts.

Both can coexist on one account: an agency can lead two house bands and be a manager in five represented ones. The band list on sign-in shows all of them, and the same login works everywhere.

What the manager role can do

Everything that matters for the booking side:

• Create gigs as requests and confirmed dates, edit them, cancel them.
• Send availability requests to the band's members by email and SMS, see who answered, send reminders, confirm.
• Write quotes from the band's service catalog, share the client link, change statuses, link accepted quotes to gigs.
• Mark participants for a gig, attach a setlist, build the packing checklist.
• Schedule rehearsals from the heat map, edit and cancel them.
• Edit songs, setlists, labels, the inventory and kits.
• Veto song proposals.
• Invite members, change roles and instruments, remove members.

Not: billing, deleting the band, or transferring it. Those belong to the leader. For the full role table see members and roles.

Availability across bands, without messages

The manager's most frequent task is "can Band X do the 14th?". In expert.band that is one action per band: create the gig as a request, send the availability request, and the members answer with one tap from a personal link. The gig page shows who is available, who is not, and who has not replied. Most bands answer within a day. The same request can be run in two bands at once for a client who would take either act.

Shared musicians are common in agency rosters, and the app handles them without special setup: a musician who is a member of three bands has one account, one login, and answers each band's request separately. Availability for rehearsals is painted per band. What the app does not do is warn a manager that the drummer in Band A is already confirmed for Band B on the same date; the band calendars are separate. Keep that check in your own overview, as described in managing several bands or projects at once.

Quotes that look like the office sent them

Each band has its own service catalog: Live set 60 min, Ceremony trio, DJ set between sets, Sound for 200 guests, Travel beyond 50 km, each with a category, description, default length and default price, with translations per language. A manager builds the catalog once per band from the agreed price list, then writes quotes in minutes: client, event date, venue, currency, language, validity date, then sections for schedule, services, coverage, pricing (with an optional VAT rate) and free text.

The client gets a private link to a clean page in their language, with a PDF download. Quotes move through draft, sent, accepted and declined, and an accepted quote links to the gig so the total shows there. Duplicating last season's accepted quote is the fastest way to write this season's. For the sales side, see working with agencies and wedding planners and writing a quote clients accept.

Honest limits: the quote carries the band's name and VAT number from band settings, not an agency letterhead; there is no agency-level template shared across bands, so the catalog and the introduction text are set up per band. Contracts, invoices and commission accounting are outside the app.

Rehearsals and logistics from a distance

A manager who is not at rehearsals still needs them to happen. In Rehearsals, members paint free hours, and the manager or the leader schedules from the heat map with a note on what to prepare. Reminders go out by email and SMS on their own, 12 hours before by default. For the gig, the packing checklist assigns items to named people, and the printed gig sheet (times, address, line-up, setlist, packing list) is what the manager sends to the venue or the client's planner.

Languages and time zones

Each band has a time zone and a default language; each member picks their own language for the app, emails and SMS. Quotes are in the client's language independent of the band's. Six languages are available: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian. An agency in Vienna quoting a French couple for a band whose drummer reads Russian is a normal setup.

What it costs an agency

• Model A, agency owns 4 bands: 3.90 + 3 x 2.00 = 9.90 a month, or 30% less on yearly billing. All members free.
• Model B, agency is manager in 4 independent bands: 0 for the agency; each band leader pays 3.90 a month for their own band.
• SMS: 50 a month per paying account, shared across that account's bands. An agency running many availability requests by SMS will hit that; email is unlimited and always sent, and the app falls back to email when the allowance is used up.
• 30-day trial with no card, everything switched on. See pricing and expert.band pricing explained.

A setup checklist for a manager

1. Register with the agency's email. Create the house bands you own, or ask independent leaders to invite you as manager.
2. For each band, load the repertoire (paste a list) and build the catalog from the agreed prices.
3. Enter confirmed dates for the next 6 months. Set open enquiries as requests.
4. Ask each band's members to add a phone number for SMS and to paint rehearsal availability 3 weeks ahead.
5. Duplicate one standard setlist per band and attach it to the next gig.
6. Send the first availability request instead of a message; note how long the last answer takes.

Where the limits are

expert.band is a band workspace, not an agency CRM. It has no lead pipeline, no cross-band calendar, no commission split, no client portal beyond the quote link, and no roster page to send to venues. Agencies that need those keep a CRM or a spreadsheet next to it and use expert.band for what happens inside each band: availability, quotes, setlists, rehearsals, packing. That division is deliberate, and for a manager with three to ten acts it removes the part of the job that generated most of the messages.