Step 4: Book your crew
Send your first booking request — pick a contact, choose where the schedule comes from, and send.
Booking someone is how you fill a role on your production. You pick a contact, decide where their schedule comes from, optionally pin a rate card, and send the request. The person responds — from their CrewGrid account, or from a unique email link if they don't have one. In this step you'll send one request.
Start from a role in Staffing and choose + New booking request (or Send request → on a contact you've already queued). The New booking request dialog opens.
Choose a contact
Search your contacts by name or email and pick the person. Next to each, a coloured availability dot hints at how free they are, if they've chosen to share it — green for free, amber for close to other work, red for mostly blocked, hollow for not shared. It's only a hint; you can book anyone regardless of colour.
📷 Screenshot:
/images/docs/tutorial-producer/booking-request-contact.pngThe booking request dialog on the contact step, with availability dots. Alt: The New booking request dialog showing a contact search with coloured availability dots.
Set the schedule source
Under Seed the booking schedule from, decide where this person's working days come from:
- Live timeline — build the schedule from your current plan, using the items linked to this role on the timeline.
- Snapshot — build it from a saved version, like the one from the previous step. A good choice when you want the booking pinned to a plan that won't shift as you keep editing.
- Custom dates — set the days by hand: pick a date range and mark each day as work, travel, hold, or off.
If the person is already booked on overlapping days, CrewGrid shows a warning — but it's only a warning, and you can continue.
If this project doesn't use the Timeline tool
Pin a rate card (optional)
Under Rate card, you can pin an agreed rate card to the booking now, or leave it for later. The rate card sets how the booking's cost is worked out — which is what the budget's Allocated column reads in the next step.
Send
Click Send request →. CrewGrid emails the request, and the person confirms, declines, or asks a question from their end.
With a booking out (and ideally a rate card pinned), you have real costs to track — time to build the budget.
Where to go next
- Next: Step 5: Build the budget
- Go deeper: Sending a booking request