Gig Desk cards are blank, or a booked gig is stuck in "New Inquiries"

You open the Gig Desk and what you see does not match what you know. Either the gig desk cards are blank - The entries on the gig desk don't have any information populated from my CRM or gigsalad, and I have to manually enter details aside from name - or the board sorts wrong: Pipeline stage sorting is wrong, with booked/confirmed gigs are showing up under "New Inquiries" instead of "Booked/done". Usually it is both at once: Lead card data generally isn't passing through from the underlying lead records. And the question underneath is always the same one: Is that normal or am I missing a setting?

You are not missing a setting. This was a real gap in the app, several performers hit it, and it was fixed in version 1.11.13. Here is what went wrong, what to do about the gigs already sitting on your desk, and what the Gig Desk actually looks like today.

First: nothing is lost

Say this to yourself before you do anything else, because the blank cards look exactly like data loss and they are not. The lead itself, every note Otto wrote, the full history and the log are all intact on the record. Whatever came in on the original inquiry is still there. What broke was the card surface: it was not reading what was already saved. Nobody has to reconstruct anything.

Where the Gig Desk is

This tab used to be called Leads. It is now Gig Desk. In the right pane, the tab row reads Today, Gig Desk, Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, Plays and Settings. The Today tab gets you there too: the Leads stat button, the See all leads link under What changed, and any entry in the Follow-ups list all open the Gig Desk.

At the top of the desk sits a Board and List toggle. Board is the pipeline: one column per stage, one draggable card per gig. List is the flat view with filter chips. Clicking a card opens Edit gig details, the editor where every field on that gig's record can be typed and saved. A gig that never arrived as an inquiry can be started by hand: Add an inquiry at the top of the desk opens that same editor empty, and Create inquiry saves it.

Why this happens

A gig's column on the board and its details everywhere else on the desk both come from one specific set of saved gig record fields: stage, event type, date, venue, contact, budget and fee. Before 1.11.13, exactly two things could write those fields, and both of them were you: opening the gig and saving it in the editor, or dragging its card into a column.

Otto could not write them at all. Neither could any import. Otto did the real work on your leads and kept all of it in his own notes and log, which is a separate place from the fields the board reads. So a gig Otto genuinely booked kept the stage it was handed the moment it was created, which is "new", and it piled into New Inquiries with a card showing nothing but a name. Two parallel records of the same gig with no bridge between them. That is the entire bug.

The fix: update to 1.11.13 or later

Click Check for updates at the top of the app. Anything from 1.11.13 onward carries the fix, and the current build is well past that. Two things change:

1. Otto now has proper tools to move a gig's stage and to fill in the card fields himself, plus standing instructions to use them the moment something real happens: a proposal goes out, a client says yes, a date gets locked. The board and Otto's own view can no longer drift apart.
2. A one-time catch-up runs after you update. Existing gigs with no stage on record get one worked out from their own history, and every gig it touches gets a line in that gig's log saying the stage was backfilled, so you can see exactly what it did and why.

Be clear about what that catch-up will and will not do. It acts only where a gig's history is unambiguous. Where the record could honestly be read two ways, it leaves the gig alone rather than guessing at your pipeline. So after updating, expect clearly booked gigs to find their columns and expect a few older ones to still want a drag from you. That is deliberate, not a miss.

Put one gig in the right column

1. Open the Gig Desk and switch to Board.
2. Drag the card out of the wrong column and drop it on the right one.
3. Dropping into Booked with no booking milestones on file stops and asks Book this gig?, naming a count like 0 of 6. Older versions worded that count as 0 of 6 facts, which read as though your information had vanished. Current versions call them tracked milestones, because that is what they are: a proposal sent, a proposal viewed, an acceptance, a signature, a retainer, a reserved date.
4. Choose Book anyway. The counter is only telling you it has no proof on file yet, not that anything is missing from the record. If you would rather record the proof first, Add milestones first opens the editor instead.

The move sticks, and the gig sorts correctly from then on. A notice appears afterwards with Undo last edit if you dropped it in the wrong place.

Fill in one gig's details

1. Click the card, or expand the gig in List view and choose Edit gig details.
2. Fill in what you know: Stage, Event type, Event date, Venue, Buyer name, Email, and the money fields such as Budget signal, Quoted fee and Agreed fee.
3. Click Save changes.

The card shows them straight away. To save yourself the hunting, ask Otto in chat to read the original inquiry for that gig and hand you the date, venue, fee and contact, then copy them across. On builds before 1.11.13 that is only a research shortcut, because the Save is still the step that writes anything onto the card. From 1.11.13 on, Otto can write those fields directly as he learns them.

When you have a lot of gigs to repair

Fixing gigs one at a time is fine for five of them and miserable for seventy. Open the Plays tab, find Gig Desk True-Up and click Run it. It works through your gigs and fills each one's record lines from what that gig's own files already say, so the desk shows the stage, date, venue, contact and money it should have been showing all along. It can only fill in what your records already contain: where a record genuinely never captured the venue, no pass over it will produce one. If that play is not in your list, you are on an older build, so update first.

Dead ends worth skipping

• Hunting for the import setting. There is no such setting to find. On builds before 1.11.13 an import from GigSalad, a CRM, a spreadsheet or your own script writes nothing to the fields the board reads, so the desk looks empty even when every underlying record is complete. People have spent real time looking for a toggle that never existed.
• Deleting a gig and re-creating it. The information is already in the record. Deleting throws away the history and log that held it, and you get a blank card again anyway. Do not do this to fix a blank card.
• Asking Otto to fix the board on an old build. Before 1.11.13 he had no tool that could touch those fields, so he would work the lead properly and the card would still sit there empty. Update first, then ask.

If you run your own importer

Some performers pull leads in with their own script rather than through the app. Your importer can write the gig record fields directly, so cards arrive already populated instead of blank. Open a ticket and ask for the durable field names, and we will send you the exact list your script should fill.

Reading and searching the Gig Desk

The search box at the top takes far more than names, and its placeholder says the range out loud: Search gigs, buyers, stages, sources, or next moves. Type a buyer, a stage, a source or a next action and the view narrows to what matches. It is the fastest way to answer "who was that school event inquiry" or "which gigs still need a quote".

The board's columns follow the pipeline stages: New inquiry, Prospecting, Qualifying, Proposal in progress, Proposal sent, In conversation, Accepted, not yet secured, Date on hold, Booked, Show completed and Lost. You can rename any of them to your own wording with Edit lists above the board, which is why some desks read "New Inquiries" and "Booked/done" instead. Show completed and Lost are folded away by default, behind the Show closed button, so a finished gig is hidden rather than gone.

In List view a row of filter chips sits under the toggle: All, New, Active, On hold, Booked, Prospecting and Lost, with a count of how many gigs match. An earlier version of this article listed an Awaiting chip; that chip is now called Active.

Each row carries the essentials without opening anything: the stage, the event date, the source, the next move, when the record was last updated, and the value. Click a row to expand it in place and you also get the Organization, the Event date, the Last client contact, the Booking evidence count, and the History timeline with every touch on that gig in order.

If a view comes up empty, "No gigs match this view." means your search text or your filter chip has narrowed everything out. Clear the search field and click All. A board that is empty with no search at all is a different problem: the desk then tells you which folder it is reading gigs from, and Settings under Your Booking HQ is where you point it at the right one.

Still not right?

Update first, then look at the desk again with fresh eyes. If a specific gig still shows the wrong column or blank fields on 1.11.13 or later, that one is worth reporting. Open a ticket and name the gig. We asked earlier customers for exactly that, because with the gig named we can trace precisely what its record read and what it did not.