Per-diems, gear, fuel, the merch table - a real-world playbook for how four-piece bands handle money on a two-week run, with worked numbers.
Bands break up over money more than they break up over music. It's rarely about a big number. It's about a hundred small numbers, none of them tracked, none of them agreed up front, all of them quietly accumulating into resentment by month three.
Below is a working playbook for how a four-piece band can handle money on a two-week run without the bassist quietly deciding the whole thing isn't worth it.
Pool guarantees and merch into a tour kitty. Pay per-diems out of the kitty. Settle the kitty at the end. Put gear, transport, and accommodation on whoever has the right card; reimburse from the kitty same-week. The merch table is its own animal and should be cash-tracked daily.
Tour money has four flavours. Each one has different rules.
Guarantees from venues, door splits, festival fees, support-slot fees. This is the band's revenue.
Default rule: everything goes into the tour kitty, held by one person (usually the band manager or whoever volunteers as "tour treasurer"). Equal split happens at the end.
Variants:
Petrol, accommodation, food, gear hire, tolls, parking. These are the costs of the tour.
Default rule: tour expenses come out of the kitty before the at-end split.
So the math is: (total income) - (total expenses) = (band's net), which is then split equally (or per the songwriter variant).
The trick is keeping a clean record. If the drummer puts £80 of petrol on their card, that's a tour expense. They get reimbursed from the kitty. They don't eat that cost personally and they don't reduce their share of the end-of-tour split.
Money for personal food and personal incidentals on the road. £20-£30 a day per band member is normal.
Default rule: per-diems are paid out of the kitty daily, in cash, equally per person. They're not tracked beyond that. What you do with your £25 today is your business.
The reason to have per-diems rather than letting people expense meals is decision fatigue. Without per-diems, every meal becomes a "is this on the band or on me?" conversation. With per-diems, you have a daily budget and you spend it however you like.
That t-shirt you bought at the rest stop. The book you read on the drive. Pre-tour gym memberships. Phone bills. These are on you, never the band.
The simplest version: a EvenRound group called "[Band name] - [tour name]". Four members (one per band member). Default currency = wherever the tour is.
Day one: log the tour float. The band has agreed each member seeds £400 into the kitty for upfront expenses (van fuel deposit, gear hire, accommodation deposits). Log four expenses of £400 paid by each member, split equally - net effect is everyone starts at zero, which is what we want.
Each show, log the door / guarantee as a "kitty income" expense. Whichever member collects the cash from the venue is the payer. Split equally across all four members.
After a £400 door split: each member sees their balance go up by £100. The collecting member sees -£300 because they paid themselves £100 (their share) and owe £300 to the rest.
This sounds fiddly. It's actually clean - the running balance shows each member's share of the kitty in real time.
Every tour expense (petrol, food the band eats together, accommodation, gear) gets logged as a "kitty expense" - paid by whoever paid in cash, split equally across all four members.
Net effect: the payer gets their cost back across the four balances; the rest of the band each absorb their share.
Each morning, the tour treasurer hands out per-diems in cash. Log it as four small "personal cash" expenses, one per band member, paid by the treasurer. Don't split.
Effect: the treasurer's balance goes down by 4 × £25 = £100 (the cash they handed out). Each band member's balance goes up by £25 (the cash they got). They're not forced to account for that £25 - it's personal money now.
Last day of the tour. The app runs the algorithm. It tells each band member who to pay how much. The transfers settle. Tour's over.
We covered the underlying maths in the greedy debt-minimisation algorithm, explained for non-coders.
Merch is a separate beast for two reasons. It's mostly cash. And it has different cost structures (printing, manufacturing, vendor fees) that aren't paid for during the tour.
Two patterns work.
Pattern 1: merch is its own kitty. Treat merch income and merch expenses as a separate ledger from tour income / tour expenses. End of tour, the merch kitty distributes on whatever schedule the band agreed (often: split equally; or recover printing costs first, then split equally).
Pattern 2: merch goes into the main kitty. Simpler, but obscures whether the merch table is actually profitable. After three tours of pattern 2, you might not realise you're losing money on shirts.
We'd recommend pattern 1. Two EvenRound groups: "Tour" and "Merch". Easier to see what's actually working.
One band member appoints themselves treasurer because they're most organised. They keep notes in their phone. Three weeks later, the notes don't balance. Numbers go missing. The rest of the band starts wondering whether the treasurer is keeping track or skimming.
The treasurer almost certainly isn't skimming. They're just doing manual bookkeeping in their phone notes app. The problem is that nobody else can audit it.
Fix: the treasurer logs every transaction in a shared tracker the rest of the band can see live. EvenRound works for this; a Google Sheet works for this. The audit trail is what removes the suspicion.
End of tour. Two crates of leftover shirts. Three different vendors paid different amounts for different runs. £4,400 in cash from the merch table over 14 nights, none of it logged nightly.
Trying to reconstruct this on the bus is a special kind of hell. Every band that has done it once tracks merch nightly afterwards.
Fix: at the end of every show, the merch person logs the evening's cash takings in the merch group. Five minutes, every night. Tour ends, the books are clean.
Year one tour: bassist gets a smaller share because they joined late. Year two tour: nobody remembers, splits are equal. Bassist quietly seethes.
Fix: write the band's money agreement down somewhere durable. Notion, Google Doc, the back of a setlist. Update it when something changes. Re-read it before each tour.
Gear and vehicles aren't tour expenses - they're band capital. Treat them differently.
Two patterns:
Don't do "the van is on Sam's name and the band uses it for free". That builds resentment from both sides - Sam ends up effectively subsidising the tour, and the rest of the band feels they have no say in van decisions.
Across a few different bands we've seen tour, the single thing that consistently goes wrong is the gap between "everyone agrees in principle" and "the agreement is written down somewhere we can find six months later". Tour 1 you remember the verbal deal. Tour 2 you remember half of it. Tour 3 you're reconstructing what you said in a pub in Manchester.
Write it down. The band's money agreement should be a single page. Pinned somewhere durable. Re-read at the start of each tour.
Create a tour groupon the day rehearsals start, not the day you leave for the airport. Every member adds their own expenses live. The treasurer's job becomes "remind people to log their expenses" rather than "do bookkeeping for four people in a notebook". You make it home solvent and unresentful.
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