How The Piano Works rosters its house band, night after night

The Piano Works puts pianists, singers and bands on stage across its venues every night. Around 115 musicians cover about 110 paid shifts a week.

The rota lived in a general staff-scheduling app that knew nothing about instruments, late slots or who had played too often, and working out what each musician was owed meant checking who had actually turned up.

• Musicians submit their availability for every day of the week, with specific hours and any time away.
• Each venue has its own weekly shift templates. The team assigns by drag and drop, or builds the whole week in one click from rules: a cap per instrument, a set number of gigs for one musician, late slots only for another, no Saturday nights for a third, and an even share for everyone else.
• Assigning someone who has said they are unavailable asks for an override, and nobody can be double booked across venues.
• A musician who cannot make a gig finds a replacement who plays the same instrument, or picks up an open shift, and the team approves the swap.
• At the end of each night the venue manager signs off who actually played. Only signed-off gigs count towards pay.
• Weekly totals per musician, with every gig's date, time and fee, go to Event UK, who invoice and pay the musicians. The app never holds money or bank details.

One rota for every venue and every musician, built in a click from rules the team can see and change, instead of by hand.

Pay is worked out from gigs the venue manager has signed off, so the weekly figures that go to Event UK match who actually played.

Every change is kept in a permanent history, with a log of who changed what.