Coworking space booking is software for reserving a desk, a cabin, a meeting room or a whole office in a coworking space, by the hour, the day or the month. A coworking space is a shared office in which many people and small companies rent desks. The booking happens either on a marketplace that lists many operators' spaces, or in one operator's own app.
What can be booked? A day pass gives one person any free desk for a day. A dedicated desk is the same desk every day, by the month. A cabin is a private room for a team. A managed office is a whole floor set up for one company, usually on a contract of a year or more.
Take, for example, a five-person start-up in Gurugram that has just raised its first funding. It does not want to sign a five-year office lease. Its founder searches a coworking marketplace for spaces near Cyber City with at least five free desks from the 1st of next month. The marketplace shows eight spaces, priced from ₹6,500 to ₹9,000 per desk per month. The founder buys a day pass at two of them to try them. Then she books five dedicated desks at one space for ₹7,500 each: ₹37,500 a month, plus 18% GST. She pays in the app, which collects the money through a payment gateway. The app then issues a GST invoice, so the start-up can claim back the tax. Each team member gets a QR code in the app. At the entrance, the space's access control system reads the code and opens the door. The plan also includes ten hours of meeting room time each month, which the team books by the hour in the same app.
A marketplace runs no space itself. It takes a fee from the operator on each booking, which is the marketplace model. An operator's own app lists only its own spaces, but the operator keeps the whole payment. Many operators use both.
The operator earns only when its desks are rented. So its software tracks occupancy, the share of desks that are rented, for every space on every day. Prices change with demand, which is dynamic pricing. For example, a day pass may cost more on a Tuesday, when offices are busiest, than on a Friday.
How is it different from desk booking and workplace management? Workplace management software is used inside one company's own office, so that its employees can book a desk or a room at no charge. Coworking booking is a sale: a customer pays an operator for space that the customer does not own.