March 2023 Cobot Updates

Hello!

The first quarter of the year has already passed, and a lot has happened in the last few months. Among the most exciting events for us were the annual meetings of the German-speaking coworking associations: We kicked off the conference season at Coworking Switzerland, and then continued at COWORK 2023, the yearly meeting of the German Coworking Federation. We were delighted to meet, talk, and celebrate with customers, partners, friends, and other software vendors. Read our full reports on the blog: COWORK2023 and Coworking Switzerland.

And within the Cobot product, plenty of things happened too. Our teams have been working hard in the last month to bring a series of improvements to your Admin and Member Portals.

External Bookings Improvements

External Bookings is one of our fastest-growing products, and we keep tuning it up. Here are some of the improvements released in March:

Customize Visitor Invoices

With External Bookings, your space can extend its services to non-members, expanding your reach and opening up new growth opportunities. Since the payment and billing processes are often different, the invoices must also be customizable for non-member payments. This is now possible with the new field Invoice text for visitors who make external bookings. You can find it under Setup » Invoice Settings.

Privacy Policy Checkbox

At Cobot, we care deeply about protecting your personal information and maintaining the highest standards of data privacy. We’ve added a privacy policy checkbox to the External Bookings form, which visitors need to confirm before completing a booking. Haven’t set up your Privacy Policy yet? You can do so under Setup » Privacy.

Improved Time Bar UI

We gave a fresh new look to the External Bookings form time bar, which shows the available and unavailable time slots when visitors are making a booking. It is now easier to use and understand, with more intuitive colors. We have used a bright, vivid green to show all the available time slots, so visitors know exactly when a resource is free, and unavailable times are greyed out.

Select which products are available for bookings

If your space has many products & services to offer, it can get overwhelming when selecting which ones you want to add to your public resources. So we updated our Products & Services feature, to make it easier for you to manage your resources. You can now with a simple checkbox select which products and services are available for external bookings.

Improved invoice and payment records UI

Managing invoices will be a smooth experience for you! On invoices, we’ve made it much easier to see your payment records - they’re now located right next to the invoice and much easier to find. We’ve cleaned up the invoices list as well. The edit button is now highlighted as the main action, and the action buttons are always visible, so you won’t have any trouble accessing them on any device. We’re excited about these consistency cleanups and hope that they make your invoicing experience even better!

Smart resetting of pending invoices

And there’s one more goodie helping you to better manage invoices: We now reset invoices to unpaid if they have been pending for over 24 hours (with the payment failing or for other reasons not going through). This makes it possible for you to try to charge them again – and not be stuck with pending invoices forever.

Cookie Consent Banner

You can trust that your privacy is our top priority, and to support you in being GDPR-compliant. We added a standard, mandatory cookie consent banner for spaces, displayed to their members and visitors of their public pages. You can still use your custom cookie banner of course – but now we provide one by default. To learn how to customize it, just reach out to our support team.

Activity Feed UI updated

The activity feed got a fresh look! It now has a timeline format, which is easier to follow, with events and updates displayed in chronological order. This change makes it easier to distinguish between time-based and non-time-based items, such as the list of bookings. You will find the updated activity feed on the dashboards for both members and admins, as well as on member and invoice pages.

Member questionnaire improvement

You know when you’re faced with a multiple-choice question, and none of the options are what you want to answer? Then there is the “Other” field, so you can add your customized answer. Now Cobot’s member survey offers this option too! Members can now write a custom answer when filling out the form – and admins can learn more and get to know their members better.

Help us make Cobot better for you

Would you like to help us shape our product and make it even better for coworking spaces and hybrid offices like yours? Join our beta tester program! There you’ll hear first about upcoming product changes, have the chance to make your voice heard, and have a very direct impact on our product development. Just reach out to us at support@cobot.me and let us know you want to be a beta tester.

See you next month, happy coworking!