Starfishr for booking organisations

What Starfishr does if you book artists for a living. This chapter walks the path a request takes, from the first message to a paid invoice, and shows where the artists and the client fit into it. The step by step instructions live in the Dutch help center.

What does Starfishr do for a booking organisation?

Starfishr is the working tool for agencies, collectives and anyone else who books artists. Requests, quotes, invoices, artists and the client all live in one place, so the whole job runs from first contact to final payment without leaving the tool.

Around that core you get the pieces this trade actually needs. Availability of the artists you work with, fee negotiation with each of them, a client portal per event, appointment scheduling with video calls, and templates for the documents that carry your own name and layout. Starfishr is built by people who book and invoice themselves, which is why it follows the way the work really goes rather than a generic sales funnel.

How does a request become a booking?

Every request starts as a lead. It arrives on its own from the contact form on your website, or you paste or forward the booking email and Starfishr reads the client details, the date, the location and the type of event out of the text. Nothing is created before you confirm it.

From there a lead becomes a deal and the deal walks a pipeline: new, contacted, meeting planned, quote sent, booked, completed. Lost and cancelled are the end states for what does not go ahead. Many of those steps happen by themselves at the key moments, so sending a quote or a client signing it moves the deal along without you updating a status by hand. You can always set one yourself.

How do quotes and invoices work?

Your client opens a personal link and approves the quote on a computer, tablet or phone. Drawing a signature is optional, filling in a name and ticking the approval box is enough. Digital signatures are legally recognised in Belgium and the EU.

The moment a quote is accepted the deal goes to booked and the artist you booked gets a confirmation. Invoicing follows the same path. You send by email with a PDF, over Peppol (the official e-invoicing network for business to business), or both at once, and Starfishr checks by itself whether a company can be reached on Peppol. Every invoice carries an EPC QR code and a structured reference, so your client scans it in their banking app and the payment details fill themselves in. Marking an invoice as paid puts a soft green PAID stamp on the document and moves the deal to completed.

How do I find and book artists?

You can see at a glance who is free on the date of an event. Each artist you work with gets a colour: available, already negotiating somewhere, booked, or private when they do not share their availability.

Working with an artist starts with a connection, a light mutual link that lets you find each other and pass leads along. Agencies can go further with representation, where an artist joins their roster and the two work together structurally. Both only ever start when the artist accepts. Once an artist is on a deal you propose a fee, and they accept, decline or counter. The full negotiation history stays visible to both sides. An artist who is not on Starfishr yet can be invited by email straight from the search.

What does my client get to see?

Every event can have its own client portal: one page holding the overview, the quotes and invoices, the team of the day, the day schedule and a cost overview. The client logs in without a password and the sections appear as they become relevant.

The portal is the client's page, not a branded window on your organisation. Every supplier on the event has an equal place on it, and the client can brief each of them separately, where nobody sees anyone else's briefing. What the client fills in about themselves, such as their address and invoicing details, lands in your CRM by itself, so you no longer have to chase it by mail. After the event the client can leave a review for the suppliers who were there.