Improve Your Coworking Space Operational Efficiency With A Better Tech Stack

When starting out, most coworking operators use a hodgepodge of tools and manual processes to run their businesses. 

For example, they manage room bookings in Google Sheets, calculate occupation by hand, and check their bank account statements to see when certain payments come through.

While this works initially, manual tasks start adding up over time and eventually become overwhelming. This leads to tons of lost time for operators and a poor experience for members.

Fortunately, technology can do a lot of this heavy lifting for you:

• On the one hand, a good coworking management software can reduce many of the administrative tasks involved in bookings, billing, payments, and other key operations.
• On the other hand, niche technological solutions (like door access or accounting software) can also improve your operational efficiency, as well as your members’ experience.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly how technology, and specifically — OfficeRnD Flex, improves efficiency in 6 key areas of operations for coworking spaces.

Let’s dive right in.

#1 Bookings

Today, requiring coworking members to book rooms or desks with a calendar or spreadsheet just won’t cut it. 

Instead, customers should be able to see which rooms and desks are available in real-time, reserve them as easily as possible, and come to your space without the risk of their space being double-booked.

OfficeRnD Flex floorplan.

Here’s how OfficeRnD makes this happen:

1. You can create memberships and other coworking products and easily list them on your site. This lets people get familiar with your offerings, as well as find and book the ideal room based on location, amenities, size, and more. That’s helpful when you’re creating coworking space events as well.
2. You can visualize your floor plan with interactive space maps. Thanks to these digital floor plans, customers can easily see when each room, desk, or workspace is available throughout the day.
3. Customers can book what they need through your portal on any device, i.e., desktop, mobile, or tablet. Once booked during a certain slot, resources are marked as such and can’t be double-booked.
4. You can enable public bookings on your website. If you want to improve utilization, you can also expose your meeting rooms to the public and allow non-members to book them.

In short, OfficeRnD Flex lets customers quickly find and book the space they need using any device, without you having to watch over the process or worrying about double bookings.

Figuring this out at an early stage is also an essential step toward pre-selling your space.

#2 Billing and Payments

Tracking which payments come through, issuing invoices manually, and setting up recurring payments can easily take hours off your workweek.

However, you can automate the entire billing and payments process by integrating modern payment processing tools with your coworking space software.

For example, OfficeRnD Flex has integrations with widely-used payment processors, like Stripe, Placepay, and PayPal.

Thanks to these integrations, our system can communicate with your payment processor, so you can easily collect online payments via credit/debit card or ACH (Direct Debit) and have the relevant payment information automatically appear in OfficeRnD.

Your members can update their billing details, as well as pay or review their invoices from the Member Portal.

Additionally, you can set up automatic invoices, choose who receives them and automate the process of sending them, thanks to our integrations with popular accounting tools, which we’ll cover next.

#3 Accounting

Nowadays, most accounting firms use software like Quickbooks or Xero to track expenses and issue invoices. Without integrating with these systems, you and your accounting team will have to do tons of manual work, like constantly checking your bank account statements and issuing invoices one at a time.

To avoid these problems, OfficeRnD Flex integrates with Xero, Quickbooks, and Sage 50. As a result, invoices are automatically generated after payments are processed and the data is reflected in real time in your accounting system.

#4 Front Desk Management

When you’re just starting out, it’s possible to greet every customer at reception and walk them to their room or desk. 

However, this practice becomes more demanding to maintain as your space grows, leading to customers waiting too long at reception and you having to constantly run back and forth to check them in.

That’s why we built OfficeRnD Reception — a white-label tablet app that:

• Enables members to easily check in and check out without needing assistance.
• Collects visitor information on entry.
• Provides visibility on who’s in your space and when. 
• Syncs member check-ins with their day-passes plan.
• Notifies members when their guests arrive for a meeting.

Put simply, OfficeRnD Reception streamlines tons of front desk management tasks and ensures a better check-in experience for your customers.

Want to bring more traffic and customers to your coworking space website? Don’t miss this video on SEO for coworking spaces!

#5 Floorplans and Occupancy Management

Many small operators build their floor plans in tools like PowerPoint and try to calculate daily, weekly, and monthly occupation by hand. 

Besides being time-consuming, this process is also prone to human error due to the many manual calculations involved. Fortunately, coworking management software helps you avoid all of that. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a digital floor plan of a coworking space.

You can easily track which desks and rooms are being used and when offices are being let go, as well as analyze occupancy in real-time.

Plus, OfficeRnD Flex Analytics also lets you build custom dashboards with the most important metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your coworking business. For more info on that, check out the video below.

#6 Lead and Member Management

Throughout their journey with your business, people move through different stages — from potential customers all the way to leads and loyal members.

In order to nudge them toward the next stage, remove friction from their journey, and improve retention, you need to keep track of what stage people are at all times. As with the previous activities on this list, this one is also very time-consuming, especially if you’re using different software to track leads and customers, like spreadsheets and CRMs.

Here’s how OfficeRnD Flex can help you simplify this process:

• Our system can be the single source of truth for all leads, opportunities, deals, and customers. This means you can easily monitor all leads, create custom opportunity pipelines to analyze sales progress, and track your revenue — all in one place.
• You can create different contract types, including Membership Agreements, License Agreements, Lease Agreements, and Quotes. This variety ensures you can meet the needs of different clients — from freelancers who just want to work in your space every few months to businesses looking for a permanent office. Each contract can also be customized to fit your brand. For more details, check out this article on contract types and templates.
• OfficeRnD Flex can also integrate with CRMs like HubSpot, Capsule, and MS Dynamics. Thanks to these integrations, our system can automatically save changes to companies and contacts in your CRM and track prospects throughout the stages of a pipeline. You can also choose which properties are synced between OfficeRnD Flex and your CRM, like status changes (e.g., lead to customer).

Bonus: Integrations for Printing, Door Access, Collaboration, and More

As we said at the start, in addition to coworking software, many niche technology solutions can make your and your customers’ lives easier.

Here are a few useful tools that OfficeRnD Flex customers utilize in their workflows:

• Door access software, like SaltoKS and KISI. By integrating these tools with OfficeRnD Flex, companies can grant door access automatically when people become members and remove it when their membership is revoked.
• Printing software, like PaperCut MF and Ezeep. Our integration with these tools automatically syncs member information and makes it possible to include print fees in invoices.
• Slack, which helps operators build their community, talk to their members directly, and make important announcements.
• Zapier, which makes it possible to integrate OfficeRnD Flex to over 1300 tools and apps.

Lastly, if you want to see how OfficeRnD Flex can help you reduce manual work, improve efficiency, and streamline operations, book a free demo with our team.