Something is off in the pre-chorus. Not a train wreck, just a half second where the chord under the vocal disagrees with the chord on top of it. You run it again. Same thing.
Ten minutes later everybody has played their part alone and every part sounds right. The keys player is playing exactly what is on his page. Nobody is wrong. Somebody says it will be fine live, and you move on, because there are six more songs to get through.
It is still there four months later.
Where the five versions come from
Nobody was careless. One person printed the first chart that came up in a search. One is reading a tab site on a phone. One worked it out by ear. One inherited a page from the guy who left, fixes and all. One learned it off the record in the car and is not reading anything.
Then somebody works out that the second chord in the pre-chorus is minor. He is right. He pencils it onto his own page before the next count-in. The band did not learn anything. One page did.
Nobody hears it as a problem, because at that size it is not one. Everybody is playing correctly according to the only page they can see, and by next week nobody remembers which song it was. A year of that across forty songs and you have five books that mostly agree.
The binder solves it, in one room
I ran the old fix for years: one binder, living in the rehearsal space, and you change it there in pencil before you play it again. Inside that room the argument about who is right takes four seconds. You go and look.
Its problem is the room. On gig night it sits on one music stand while the other four are back on their own pages.
Pick a version and write it down
Before it is a filing problem it is a band decision. The album version, the faster live one, or the one in the key your singer can still hold at the end of a three hour night? Second solo or not? Cold stop, or the fade nobody can end together?
Somebody has to say which one it is, and it goes at the top of the chart. Key, ending, which recording. Three lines. That is what stops you relitigating it every six weeks.
One librarian
The tidy answer is that everybody keeps their own chart up to date. That has never happened in a band and it is not going to start in yours. Four of you did not show up to do data entry.
Every band that has this solved has one person who cares about the charts more than the others. That is the librarian. Keep the version, take the corrections, be the place people go to look.
The other four owe two things, and neither one is typing. Stop keeping a private copy, and say the correction out loud instead of pencilling it in quietly. "I think that second one is minor" takes two seconds, and it is often the most useful thing anyone says all night.
Where BandBinder comes in
BandBinder gives the band one library. The librarian fixes the chord once and everyone online has it in seconds on whatever they are holding. The key and the ending travel with the song, and everyone else joins free with a band code and maintains nothing. One limit worth knowing: sync carries text, not files, so a PDF stays on the device you added it to.
The version your band plays is a real thing. It has a key, an ending, and a couple dozen small decisions that took months to make. It only exists if it exists in one place.