Limit when scheduling band member stand-ins

[melodeonman]

I am thinking of moving from Set List Maker to Band Helper, mostly to help with scheduling.  However, I have hit an obstacle.

I have registered for the 5 band member licence.  There are actually 4 regular band members but I frequently have to ask different people to deputise when one of our regulars is not free.  Sometimes I go for two deputies because of the different line-up.  The deputy pool is 5 or more people, so it is never the same 1 or 2.

With our current setup I cannot register a pool of people just so that I can book them occasionally.  Although I have a spare licence the stand-in is almost never the same person, so using that does not help as all the emails are different.  If I manually have to handle the stand-ins I might as well just use the set-up I have currently as it would be no extra work.

Is there any way round this?

[arlo]

With a 2-5 user account, you can have 5 active users at a time. You can add more users as long as you deactivate someone first. So you can add all of your subs as inactive users, then activate whichever one is needed for the next gig.

[melodeonman]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think that will work for me.  I tried playing around with various ways of doing this, including your suggestion.  The problem is that if there are various different subs only one can log in to check future gig info.  I'd have to activate and de-activate constantly and anyone who is currently de-activated could not log in.  I don't want to have to double the price by going up to the next level of users just for the odd occasion when we need 1-2 subs.  I looked at the idea of a guest user, but then the email address would be wrong.  Since scheduling is the biggest issue driving me towards Bandhelper from just Set List Maker I think I shall to just go back to my old way of working.  It's a shame, as BH has lots of potential, but it's just not what I need right now.

If there are features being considered the other major issue for me is customer bookings.  I have a constant stream of emails to customers to set up a booking.  I have them complete an electronic form.  I'd like to be able to have this integrated on the web with all the other band stuff.  I also need to send a reminder when the next payment is due.  All that would integrate nicely with the finance module.  But there would need to be a separate customer login where they could only see their bookings.  I do all of this on separate web sites at the moment.  I use Joomla for my own web development and searched all over for a simple event booking system, but there is nothing oriented towards bands.

Thanks.

[arlo]

Through the Contacts module, you can schedule reminders (Actions) to do things like follow up with a booking or send an invoice. But BandHelper doesn't send messages to clients for you. I can put that and a client login on my wish list, but I suspect most people would want to keep those as personal rather than automated messages.

[Rvandersteen]

Melodeonman,

Our band has 10-12 full time members and we have a handful of subs that rotate through. We've got 80% of the regulars on BH and we've set up generic sub accounts (ie "Sax Sub"). When we have a sub, we just give them the log in for the instrumentation they need and they add the app and download all the data. We haven't gotten to the point where our subs log in to BH site to check for future gig info and we really haven't used the event reminder/scheduling info. We manage most of the event stuff via email right now. We are actively moving all the event stuff into BH and will be transitioning to using the event reminders, etc, but I doubt that we'll shift to having dedicated logins for subs. Most of them might only play 5 gigs at most a year.

I'm not sure of your situation, but it's possible that the generic account for subs might work for you. I will say that for the size of our group, we've purchased the 6-20 pro license and we are extremely happy with the value it's provided to our group. I used to spend over an hour before every gig removing my music from those plastic binder pages and putting it in order. Multiply that by the number of people in our group and the cost/benefit for BH is a no brainer!

Good luck!