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Staffing on Soundcheck is built from four things. Once you can name them, the rest of this page (statuses, seats, per-day answers, what you can change after sending) follows from how they nest.
This is the deep reference. If you’re staffing your first gig, start with Building teams for gigs and come back here when you need the details.

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The four pieces

Two consequences worth internalising:
  • A position can have several shifts on the same gig. Load-in, show, and strike are three shifts for one position, including two on the same day, with some of the same people on both.
  • A shift holds many offers, and every person answers for themselves. There is no group accept.
Give a shift its own name, such as “Load-in” or “Show call”, rather than leaving it as the position name. On a gig with three shifts for one position, the name is the only thing telling them apart in emails and on the crew’s phones.

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Two kinds of shift

You pick this when you create the shift, and it decides what “filled” means.
Early access: Open shifts are rolling out gradually. Contact info@soundchecklive.io if you’d like them turned on for your organization.
Where enabled, a draft shift can switch between the two before you send it: choose Switch to open shift or Switch to job offer to change how it will fill, without rebuilding it from scratch. On an open shift, the first people to accept, up to its slots, are booked; anyone who accepts once it’s full is parked on Standby instead of turned away. If a booked person later drops off, the shift reopens and standby recipients are still waiting on an answer, so they can be moved onto it.

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Shift statuses

The shift exists only for you. Crew do not see it in their Mailbox or on the gig. Everything is editable, call times may be left blank, and there may be nobody on it yet. Nothing you do to a draft sends a notification.
People have been notified and are responding. You can still change seats, call times, and who is on it. Pay is locked: it is the deal they accepted, so repricing means cancelling the shift and re-issuing it.
An open shift is filled when every day is at capacity. A job offer is filled when you set Need and accepted crew meet it, with nobody left to answer. A filled shift reopens by itself if someone drops off.
Set an expiry when you create a shift and unanswered offers close themselves at that time. Nobody can respond after it.
Everyone still attached is notified, and unpaid payouts for the shift are voided.

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Where each person stands

Every offer carries its own status, shown on the shift and on the Shifts tab’s Grid view.
Declines never fill a shift. Ten people declining does not make a shift “done.” Only acceptances count toward Need or capacity.
Someone who already accepted and can’t make it anymore isn’t stuck: they can withdraw from their side in their Mailbox, which frees their seat the same way a decline does.

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Save replacement crew before sending

On an Open or Filled shift, add replacement or additional crew in Edit shift, then choose Save without sending. This saves only the unsent crew selection and their individual rates; review other shift changes separately. Saved people appear as Not sent and stay on the shift after a reload. Their individual rates remain editable until you send, while the shift’s published rate stays locked. They do not count toward crew totals or capacity, appear in the crew’s inbox or calendar, or receive time-change, cancellation, reminder, or expiry notifications. Removing someone marked Not sent sends no cancellation. If two managers edit the same shift at once, each save applies only the people and rates that manager changed, so neither save erases the other. When the rates are ready, choose Send to N new crew, review, and confirm. Only the unsent people receive the offer, at their saved rates; existing crew are not notified again just because you add someone.

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Availability and shift capacity

Check availability and recorded commitments before sending work. Conflict indicators help a scheduler review overlapping calls; they do not universally block another booking. Open-shift capacity is a separate limit on how many people can accept that shift. An open seat does not establish that its recipient is available.

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Seats: capacity and Need

Need is optional, and leaving it blank is a real choice rather than an incomplete form:
  • Need set: the shift is a target. It fills when accepted crew reach that number, and the gig list and calendar show it as covered.
  • Need blank: the roster is unbounded. Add as many people as you like; nothing claims the shift is filled, and no fill target is invented for you.
Clearing Need, or raising it above the crew who already accepted, opens a filled shift again. Setting it when accepts already meet it fills it.

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Multiday gigs answer day by day

On a gig spanning several days, a shift’s days are the truth, not a single date range.
  • Each day carries its own call time and, if you use a rate card, its own rate.
  • Crew accept and decline per day. Someone can take Friday and Saturday and pass on Sunday.
  • Capacity is counted per day, so Friday can be full while Sunday is still open.
  • Their payout is the sum of the days they actually accepted.
When one day has its times set, choose Copy times to all days beside it to apply them to the other days. If the shift uses per-day rates, the action reads Copy times & rate to all days and copies the rate too.
Call times can run past midnight. When the out time is earlier than the call time, Past midnight (next day) turns on and the out time lands the next morning. You do not need a second day for a 6 PM–2 AM call.

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Adding or removing days on a live gig

A gig’s dates used to freeze the moment anything went out. That rule exists to stop agreed work from moving underneath the people who accepted it, but a festival adding a load-in day, or cutting a third show, isn’t that. Growing or shrinking the range doesn’t move the days anybody agreed to; it only changes which days exist either side of them. So what matters is the shape of the change, not the fact that it happened:
Removing a day is not reversible. The day’s roster, its answers, and its calendar invites are cancelled outright. Putting the day back gives you an empty day, not the crew who were on it.
A day that has already passed can’t be removed at all, confirmation or not. Someone may have shown up and been paid; that would be rewriting history rather than changing a plan.

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What removing a day does to pay

It depends on how the shift is priced, and the notice each person gets says which:
  • Flat rate: a flat fee buys the shift, not the day, so nothing changes for someone who still works the shift. Only when they lose every day does the fee come off.
  • Rate card (per-day rates): their payout is recalculated from the days that remain.
  • Hourly: their payout is recalculated as the rate times the scheduled hours of the days that remain.
Removing work never increases what’s owed for it. If a payment has already gone out for a removed day, it is left alone and flagged for someone to settle by hand rather than silently reversed.

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Pay is the deal, not a field

Once a shift goes out, its rate is what people accepted. Changing it would rewrite terms someone already agreed to, so pay freezes at send: the flat rate, the rate type, and the per-day rate card alike. Repricing is a deliberate act: cancel the shift and re-issue it, which puts the new number in front of every recipient instead of moving it underneath them.
This holds in both directions. A raise is still a change to agreed terms, and one rule leaves no argument about what counts as favourable, nor any way for a mistyped 450 to land as 45.
One exception, and it isn’t really one: you can still set a rate for someone you add after the shift went out. They have accepted nothing yet, so that’s agreeing terms for the first time rather than changing them. Once they accept, their rate is fixed too.

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Editing a shift after you’ve sent it

This is where most of the questions come from, so here is the whole picture.
Removing someone from a live shift rebuilds it, which re-notifies the people who remain. If you only need to take one person off, expect the rest of the crew to see an update.

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Changing a call time after people have accepted

Load-in slipping an hour used to mean cancelling the shift and starting over, losing the roster and re-asking everyone from scratch. You can now move the call time in place.
1

Change the time

Edit the shift: from Edit shift on the Staffing board, the day-sheet, or Edit Crew on the gig’s Details page. On a multiday shift, change only the days that actually moved. Selecting several shifts and using Change times applies one window across all of them.
2

Review who it reaches

Before saving, Soundcheck tells you how many people have already accepted and that they’ll be able to decline. Only the days you actually moved are counted.
3

Everyone still attached is notified

People who accepted and people still deciding both hear about it, however they’ve chosen to be notified. The message names the day and the old and new windows. People who already declined, and people parked on standby, are left alone.
4

They keep the spot, or hand it back

Anyone who already accepted sees the change in their Mailbox with two choices: Keep my spot or Decline the new time. Doing nothing keeps the spot. Silence is not a drop.
The right to decline applies only to this change. It opens for the people who answered before you moved the time, covers only the days that moved, and closes as soon as they respond. Someone who accepted after the change never sees a prompt: they already agreed to the new time.

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When someone declines the new time

They come off the shift for the days they declined, and everything that acceptance set up is undone:
  • Their seat is freed, and a filled shift opens again so you can re-staff it.
  • They come off the gig’s calendar for those days, and that shift’s automatic availability block is removed. Other accepted work or marked-unavailable entries may still cover that time.
  • Their payout is voided, or recalculated down to the days they kept.
  • You’re notified that they dropped, the same as any other decline.
A payout that has already been paid, or that has payments attached, is never voided automatically: the money genuinely moved. The person comes off the shift and the payout is left standing for you to settle by hand.

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Who gets notified, and when

Saving a draft never notifies anyone. Save & Send is what opens a shift and tells people about it.

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One roster, however seats were filled

A gig’s roster is the union of its accepted invitations and its accepted crew-offer recipients, de-duplicated by position and person. Whether someone was invited directly or accepted an open shift, they appear once, in one place, under one response model.

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Save the board as a team template

Once a gig is staffed the way you like, choose Save as team in the Staffing header. It opens the same team-template form the Crew page’s Teams tab uses, already filled in from the board:
  • One seat per position, sized to the shift’s Need (or the people on it, if that is more). Several shifts on the same position, such as one per day, fold into a single slot sized to the largest of them, so a person working every day is listed once.
  • Accepted crew sit in the first seats, then pending, then standby. People who declined or were removed are not on the team, and a person who holds two positions is listed once.
  • The name defaults to the gig’s title plus “Team”. Rename it, pick a category, trim the roster, and save.
The template lands in your organization’s team library, so Use a team on any other gig drops the same crew shape back onto its board as draft shifts. Pay does not travel with a template; set fees on the new gig’s shifts before you send.

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House labor from the labor call

The gig’s Staffing tab has three views: Crew, Labor call, and Travel (see Travel). Labor call is where you plan local house labor: the union local, steward and steward call, rules or penalty notes, and one row per department with call times and hands for load-in, show, and load-out. Add standard departments fills in the usual rows. Each department’s load-in, show, and load-out becomes a house labor shift: load-in on the first day, show on every day, load-out on the last day. A load-out earlier than the show call lands on the next morning. House labor shifts are never sent to anyone and carry no pay; they record head counts and call times. The Crew view shows a house labor summary that links to the labor call, and changing the gig’s dates moves the days with them. On gigs without a Staffing tab, the labor call shows on the Venue tab, and crew see it read-only in the mobile app and on the call sheet. Team templates can carry labor call lines. Applying one adds the departments the gig doesn’t already have.

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New shifts reuse the last call times and pay

A new shift starts from the last one you set up for the same position. Soundcheck copies the call times and pay from that position’s most recently edited draft or live job offer, including when you add a shift from a position’s row. The shift sheet says so: Call times and pay copied from “Load-in”. Edit below if this shift differs.

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Duplicating a shift

Rather than build a similar shift from scratch, duplicate an existing one from its edit view: Duplicate shift copies it without any crew, or, on a shift that already has people accepted, Duplicate with crew carries the roster forward onto the copy too. Either way the copy starts as a fresh draft you review before sending.

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The Shifts tab on Crew

Crew & contacts → Crew has a Shifts tab, with Grid and List views:
  • Grid is a cross-gig matrix: your org positions as rows, upcoming gigs as columns. Each cell shows who’s staffed for that position on that gig (accepted, pending, and declined, with backups tagged BU), and also shows the available members who said they’re free that date and hold that position, so you can fill a hole without leaving the grid. Each row shows a “N working” count. This is the “who’s covering what over the next few weeks” view: the place to catch an unstaffed position across every upcoming gig at once.
  • List shows shifts one at a time, gig by gig.

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Troubleshooting

Pay freezes when a shift is sent, in both directions: it’s the deal people accepted. Cancel and re-issue to reprice. You can still set the rate for someone you add afterwards, until they accept.
Two reasons the field itself is locked, and it tells you which: it’s an hourly shift (the hours are the pay, so cancel and re-issue), or the shift is cancelled or expired. There’s a third case the field can’t show in advance: a day that has already passed is refused when you save, because the call either happened or it didn’t.
It shouldn’t. A shift reopens by itself when an accepted person comes off. If it hasn’t, check whether Need was lowered to match the crew who remain.
Check whether they accepted only some days of a multiday shift. The roster reflects the days they actually took.
Notifications only go out when the effective window actually changes. Re-saving the same time is a no-op on purpose, so a routine save never pages your crew. Drafts never notify at all.
Check their email address, look in spam, and confirm they haven’t unsubscribed. A person with no account gets the shift by email with a link that opens their own shift. Links in earlier messages continue to show the current shift details when a reminder or update arrives. A text reaches them only when the Text them at this number box was ticked. When they sign up with the same email, the shift attaches to their new account.

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People without an account

A shift can be staffed with someone who doesn’t have a Soundcheck account: an outside singer on a personal email, or a sound engineer from a vendor. Use Add someone without an account in the picker. You need their first name and email. Phone is optional; tick Text them at this number only if they agreed to texts. They get an email with a link. The link opens their own shift in the browser, with no sign-in, showing the event, the venue, their position, their call window, their sound check and their instructions. They accept or decline each day. Nothing on that page shows a fee or any pay. Each send creates its own expiring link. Links from successfully delivered messages remain usable when a reminder or a changed shift arrives, and each opens the current shift details. Shifts that are cancelled, or gigs that are in the past or still in draft, don’t open at all. Per-person details work on any shift: a sound check time, special instructions and, on a day-based shift, a different call window for one day. A person on two shifts keeps a separate sound check and instructions on each. Leader roles (Music director, MC, Leader) are one per gig. A featured act can be booked as one unit with one contact, the lead. A swap adds the replacement before the outgoing person is removed, so the seat is never empty partway through. Position short codes (K, B, G, D, SAX, TRPT, TBN, PERC, MV, FV, A1) are set per organization under Settings → Organization → Positions. They print on the call sheet and the roster.

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Next steps

Building teams for gigs

The two ways to staff a gig, start to finish.

Managing positions

Your organization’s position catalog.

Call lists

Reusable lineups with backup call order.

Gig payments

How accepted fees become crew payouts.