Master Tour Day Sheets, Meet the Truck: Wiring Truck Packer Into Every Show Day

Master Tour is where your tour lives day-to-day — but the load plan never makes it onto the day sheet. Here's how to wire Truck Packer pack views into specific Master Tour dates so the right crew sees the right truck diagram on the right day.

Michael Keith Lewis
Michael Keith Lewis
Master Tour Day Sheets, Meet the Truck: Wiring Truck Packer Into Every Show Day

Anyone who has ever run advance for a touring production knows the awkward seam: Master Tour holds the day. Every load-in time, every soundcheck, every doors call, every bus call, every crew member's hotel and flight — it all sits in Eventric's day sheet. The crew opens the app, sees the day, and works the plan.

Except for the truck. The truck — the actual physical arrangement of seventy-some road cases inside fifty-three feet of trailer — almost never lives in Master Tour. It lives in someone's head, on a wrinkled PDF taped to a workbox, in a Dropbox link buried two messages deep in a thread the local hands were never CC'd on. The result is the most consistent bottleneck in modern touring: a beautifully organized day sheet that goes silent at exactly the moment the back doors of the truck swing open.

That gap is fixable now, and the fix is simpler than most production teams realize. Master Tour exposes a clean v5 REST API. Truck Packer's API returns shareable pack URLs that render a live 3D load plan in any browser. Once you connect those two surfaces, every show date in your tour can carry its own truck — visible to the right crew, on the right day, without anybody hunting for a file.

This post is a working blueprint. We'll walk through the primary use case (a pack view attached to a specific date), then four secondary integrations that compound the value once that primary link is in place.

The core idea: one pack URL per date, embedded where the crew already looks

The crew doesn't need a new app. They need the right context on the surface they already open every morning, which is the Master Tour day sheet.

Master Tour's data model is helpful here. Every tour date is a day with a stable dayId. Every day owns an array of itinerary items — the load-in, the lobby call, the catering window, the doors. Each itinerary item accepts a title and a free-form details field via the Touring API at touring-api.eventric.com, and the day itself accepts generalNotes, travelNotes, and hotelNotes via the v5 REST API. Any of those fields will happily hold a URL.

That's the whole insertion point. Build the pack in Truck Packer. Grab the shareable view URL. Drop it into the day's load-in itinerary item — or into general notes if you'd rather it sit at the top of the sheet. The next time anyone on the day's crew refreshes Master Tour Mobile, the truck diagram is one tap away.

Done by hand, that's a one-minute job per show. Done through the API, it's a loop:

  • 1. GET https://my.eventric.com/api/v5/tours — list active tours.
  • 2. GET /tours/:tourId?numPastDays=0 — enumerate every upcoming date with its dayId.
  • 3. For each date, POST https://steady-beagle-345.convex.site/api/v1/packs — create a Truck Packer pack named after the venue + date.
  • 4. Capture the pack URL.
  • 5. POST /api/v5/itineraryItems against the load-in slot — or PATCH /days/:dayId with the URL appended to generalNotes — so the link lives on the day.

In Eventric's Touring API, the rich-text details field on a ScheduleItem (the field they internally call tsi_details) is the cleanest home for a pack link, because it renders inline in the mobile app and supports basic HTML. Recent updates to the Master Tour mobile app — including the 7.1.10 beta released earlier this year — have continued to improve how itinerary details surface on phones backstage, which is exactly where local hands check the day. (Eventric Support — Mobile 7.1.10 Beta release notes)

Use case 1: Crew views per date

This is the headline use case and the one worth setting up first, because everything else builds on it.

The local hands at the Ryman don't need to see the pack for next week's show in Cleveland. The Cleveland steward doesn't need yesterday's St. Louis diagram. Production wants to send each crew exactly the truck they're touching that day, no more, no less.

Master Tour already does the date-scoping for you. A day sheet only shows the day. A pack URL embedded into that day inherits the same scoping for free — no permissions to manage, no Dropbox folder to gatekeep, no Slack thread to maintain. The local crew opens Master Tour for tonight's show, sees a "Load-in" itinerary item with a "Truck Pack" link inside, taps it, and the 3D pack opens in their browser with the right cases in the right order for the truck that just rolled up.

A few practical wrinkles worth handling in your integration script:

  • Name the pack so it survives the day. Use the format YYYY-MM-DD — Venue — City so months later, when the tour manager is reconciling, the pack title matches the Master Tour day exactly.
  • Use one shareable link, not a fresh pack each rebuild. Truck Packer pack URLs are stable. If the loadmaster updates the pack mid-tour (a new sub-rental shows up in Denver, two anvils get added in Boise), the same URL keeps working. Don't regenerate it.
  • Mark it as a confirmed itinerary item. If you drop the link onto its own line item ("Truck Pack — view 3D plan") rather than burying it in load-in details, flag isConfirmed: true so it doesn't look like a tentative entry on the day sheet.

Use case 2: Auto-spawn a pack for every new date

Tours grow. A leg adds a hold for a one-off festival, a routing change inserts a new B-market show, a private event materializes in week six. Every new date that lands in Master Tour is a date that needs a truck plan, and the integration should treat it that way.

Run the date-sync as a scheduled job — once a day is fine, hourly if you're touring at festival cadence. Diff the list of Master Tour dates against the list of Truck Packer packs by name. For any Master Tour date without a matching pack, create one, seed it with the standard 53' dry van trailer Truck Packer drops in by default, and write the pack URL back into the day's itinerary.

The loadmaster gets a clean canvas waiting for them every time a new date appears, instead of a panicked "do we have a pack for the 17th yet?" three hours before the truck call.

Use case 3: Per-truck splits for tours running more than one trailer

Headlining tours often run two, three, or four trailers — main pack, video pack, lighting pre-rig, merch and wardrobe. One pack URL per day stops being enough.

Master Tour handles this gracefully if you let it. Create one itinerary item per truck on the load-in line ("Truck 1 — Audio + Backline," "Truck 2 — Lighting Pre-rig," "Truck 3 — Video"), and attach the appropriate Truck Packer pack URL inside each. The day sheet now reads like a load-in plan: each truck has a call time, a dock door (if your steward has been thorough), and a clickable 3D diagram showing exactly what's inside it.

This also solves a problem the typical Dropbox-PDF workflow can't: a steward at the door knows immediately which truck they're cracking open, because the link they tapped told them. No more "which truck is this again?" while a forklift idles.

Use case 4: Pulling venue context out of Master Tour and into the pack

The flow doesn't have to be one-directional. Master Tour stores venue records with addresses, contacts, and (if you've been diligent on advance) loading dock dimensions and parking notes in the production fields exposed by the Desktop API. That data is useful inside the pack, not just on the day sheet.

A simple enrichment pass on pack creation can:

  • Pull the venue's load-in door dimensions from Master Tour and write them into the pack description, so the loadmaster sees them when planning.
  • Pull the steward's name and phone number from Master Tour contacts and put them in the pack notes — one less tab for the touring production manager to switch to.
  • If the venue has dock-restriction notes ("Box truck only, no 53-footers — must park around the corner"), surface that into the pack's name or description so it gets seen before someone routes a tractor-trailer into a dead end.

This is the kind of move that quietly removes 20-minute problems before they happen. As industry guides on tour-day workflows put it, the day sheet is meant to be "a succinct guide to everything happening on a given day," and the truck is part of "everything." (tourmanager.info — Day Sheets)

Use case 5: Closing the loop with Cargo Measure and pull sheet sync

For teams already running Flex Rental Solutions, Rentman, or a vendor manifest workflow, the integration can extend further upstream. Pull-sheet line items get parsed into Truck Packer cases, the pack gets built (manually or with a packing-strategy script), the pack URL gets pushed to Master Tour, and the loop closes.

This is also where Cargo Measure — the LIDAR-based case measurement app Backline Logic is developing — slots in. Scan a road case with your phone, get accurate dimensions, auto-create the case in Truck Packer, drop it into the day's pack, and the new piece of gear shows up on the crew's day sheet diagram without anyone touching a spreadsheet. The physical-to-digital gap that has dogged touring logistics for thirty years closes one road case at a time.

What this isn't

This isn't a pitch for ripping out anyone's existing workflow. The loadmaster's whiteboard isn't going anywhere. The steward's clipboard isn't going anywhere. What changes is that the diagram the loadmaster built — the one that previously lived in their head or in a screenshot — now travels with the show, in the same app the rest of the crew is already opening every morning.

It also isn't a Master Tour replacement. Master Tour does what Master Tour does extraordinarily well. The integration is additive: Eventric stays the system of record for the day, and Truck Packer stays the system of record for the truck. They just stop being two separate worlds.

Where to start

If you run advance for a tour and want to try this on your next show day, start small. Open one Master Tour day, build the matching pack in Truck Packer, copy the shareable URL into the load-in itinerary item, and watch what the local crew does with it the next morning.

If you're a developer or a TI working production tech, the integration is a weekend project: OAuth 1.0 against Eventric's v5 API, a bearer token against Truck Packer, a small reconciliation loop, and a cron. Drop us a note if you want a worked example — we're putting together a reference repo that does exactly this, and we'd rather build it with input from the production managers who'll actually use it.

The day sheet is the most-opened document in touring. It's about time the truck showed up on it.