Note: This article is outdated - our External Booking tools are now even better! Read our updated article to find out how Cobot’s External Bookings can increase your revenue while growing your community.
This is one of our biggest announcements of the year! We have a number of features we rolled out in the past few weeks to improve your experience, and the first of these involves Bookings.
Multiply Your Profits with External Bookings
That’s right, starting today, you can try the new External Bookings add-on.
Space rental for events, meetings, workshops and even weddings is a major income source for many coworking spaces. In fact, underutilized meeting rooms and other common areas can be the most profitable asset of a coworking space: When optimized for external bookings, they can generate the biggest revenue ratio of $ per hour.
While new members are very interested in how many conference room hours they get on their plan, we know that for the most part of a month, they will just stay at their desks and rarely make use of them. You can take better advantage of all that available space you already have and optimize your profits.
Taking on external bookings adds a new revenue source which will increase your revenue significantly and create additional opportunities to get new members.
While our product is primarily focused on membership and community-based coworking spaces, over the years we’ve built several solutions to accommodate new industry trends and give you the flexibility you need to run your space as you want it.
We know this is something you have all been patiently waiting for it, and we’re excited to share details of this new feature with you. So let’s get right to the point:
The new External Bookings add-on is located in the Bookings section.
From there, you will need to activate the resources you want to offer for external bookings.
Once you have selected the rooms you will be directed to a page where you can add specific time slots available for booking and edit the pricing, E.g.: full day, half day, 10 hours etc.
At the top of this page you will see your resource link. All you need to do is to copy it, and either add it to your website, or send it to your leads over email or text.
When someone clicks on that link they will be redirected to a booking form. There they can see available the dates and times, add their details and finalize their booking.
This form will populate the calendar and add the person as a member under a plan named “External Booking”. From there you can either invoice them manually or connect them to add their payment details.
Introducing External Bookings is the starting point of big releases for easy non-member management. Following on from this release, we plan to work on making Cobot even more flexible and open for you, your members and your extended community. So, stay tuned, you can expect a bunch of exciting announcements in next upcoming months.
Member’s Avatars
We now have member avatars on the member overview!
Ideally, you’d know all your members by their names, but we know that is not an easy task, especially if your space has 100+ members.
Switch off time passes pooling for teams
We released the ability to switch off time passes pooling between members of a team.
Up until now, regardless of the member’s plan or position within a team, if they had time passes included in their plan, those would be added to the company’s overall pool of time passes.
Although we are all up for horizontal models of organization, we understand that sharing time passes is just not for everyone and can cause a lot of confusion — and most importantly, we know that you’re the one who has to deal with it afterwards.
For this reason, we have now added the option to turn off the time pass sharing amongst team members. To turn this function off for your space simply get in contact with our support team through the chat support or email us at support@cobot.me.
Payment Details UI Improvement
You know our design team has been polishing up Cobot’s interface. So this small new update is also part of the wave of UI enhancements we’ve been delivering in the past few months.
It might be a small detail but it makes the payments section look much clearer.
We are working to prioritize the updates based on your feedback so keep the suggestions coming!
Happy Coworking
