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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 — “Load-in”, “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.

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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 Staffing grid.
Declines never fill a shift. Ten people declining does not make a shift “done” — only acceptances count toward Need or capacity.

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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.
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.
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 is scoped to the 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 the auto-block on their personal availability is removed, so they show as free again.
  • 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 People → 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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The staffing grid

The Staffing tab in the People workspace 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.
  • Cells also surface 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.

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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 — 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. People who haven’t claimed their account yet are held back until they do — the shift replays to them on signup.

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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.