Background
Conference/Meeting room hours are an important aspect of flexible workspaces. As the Coworks platform evolves to handle the needs of the industry, we want to ensure we're offering the most flexibility in managing (and monetizing) your bookable spaces.
We've made some changes that will immediately impact the 'member overage rates' and the Booking Usage Report in Coworks.
Today, with each Plan in Coworks you can indicate how many booking hours you want to include with that plan. These hours are then assigned and tracked on a team as they make bookings. In addition (previously) you would set the "Overage Rate" at the Plan level.
Overages To Rooms
With the latest update we have MOVED THE OVERAGE ONTO THE ROOMS. You can now go to each individual bookable room or resource in your space and set a unique member overage rate for that room. This will be used to calculate the final "overage cost" owed by a member when they use up their allotted hours.
By moving the overage rate to the room from the plan, you can now weight your rooms accordingly. Different rooms can now represent different value to members to more accurately reflect their worth.
Imagine for example you have 2 conference rooms, 'Room A' and 'Room B'. Room A is a standard huddle room that fits 3-5 people and includes a whiteboard and a tv monitor. Room B, however is a large 20 person conference room, intended for more formal or premium meetings.
In the previous setup, a member would be charged the same 'overage rate' for hours booked in Room A as with Room B. However the value of time in those rooms are greatly disproportionate. Now you can accurately weight those rooms to capture the appropriate value for that time.
Note: You are no longer able to set overage rates at the plan level and must set one for each room. An overage rate that is unset will result in $0 rate for that room (no charge)
Booking Usage Report Changes
Overage calculation
The following changes will have an immediate impact on the way the Booking Report is calculated.
Going forward we will use the rates on the ROOM in order to dynamically calculate a member's overage cost that they should be charged for the month. Previously this logic looked at the plan but will not look at the member overage rate of the room of each booking that happened after going over their included hours.
Date picker and booking usage periods
Going forward you can only download reports for one month at a time. This is due to how the overages are calculated in our system.
Firstly booking hour allotment is based on a monthly usage period. At the end of the month, the hours reset back to 0. Booking usage is calculated based on the time the bookings were created. This means that a team is deducted hours for the month based on the when they made the booking and not when the booking occurs.
Let's say a team has 10 booking hours for the month. If they were to book 10 hours worth of bookings (4 for this month, 4 for next month, 2 for the following month) then they will have used their hours for the month and will go over for any new bookings created. It does not matter that the start date of the booking occurs in a future month, but it does matter that they were all created during this period.
Note: This implementation is intended to create an equitable experience for everyone. The average person can book meetings as they come up but this prevents from booking out tons of hours in advance only to potentially "cancel" those bookings, and prevent others from having claimed that time in the interim.
Update to team usage report
To help with the above changes, we've added some updates to the team-based booking usage report.
When downloading the booking usage report, choose 'Filter By Team' to get a custom report for that team and their specific usage
The report is updated to include two tabs.
The first tab is a summary of usage for that team. It includes the team's allowance for the period, their hours usage, whether they exceeded those hours, and their total overage charge.
The 2nd tab shows you a list of all of the bookings for that period that make up that usage and the associated charge. For each booking you can see an 'overage charge' that indicates how much that booking cost.
Note: Bookings made before the user has exceeded their allowance do not result in an overage cost.
Conclusion
Ultimately these changes are part of our continued effort to make our booking system more flexible, powerful, and give you the tools to uniquely monetize your space.
Soon we will be moving to a broader credit-based system that allows you to not only weight the rooms for overage charges, but to also weight the value of a booking itself. For example Room A may cost 3 credits to book whereas Room B may cost 1. Now instead of an "hour allowance" you can give a "credit allowance" and weight both the "included bookings" and set overages that are weighted differently across each resource.
More on that to come and happy coworking!
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