Re: Membership Software

[mat...@rocketfishmedia.com]

Any luck with this Jason?  I'm also running into this issue for my space.  Let me know if you've received any feedback privately. 

Cheers,

Matt

On Monday, January 21, 2013 5:30:52 PM UTC-5, Jason Saltzman wrote:

Hello everyone. I own and operate a co-working space in Midtown NYC, called AlleyNYC. We are looking for a member management solutions that would integrate with a magnetic door lock mechanism, where we can also manage certain pain points such as conference room allotment etc. I kindly ask for suggestions from any veteran. Racking my brain! Thanks in advance and Happy New Year to ALL! 

Jason    

[Tom Brandt]

We are rolling our own and am open-sourcing it. It works with the magnetic door lock mechanism we are using. It is not nearly ready for prime-time, since right now it is Workantile-centric and I am still working on several necessary features. One of the things on my feature list is to genericize t so other coworking communities can use it. When that is complete I will make a general announcement about it.

However, you are welcome to take a look at it and even clone it, modify it, and use it if you wish: https://github.com/workantile/openings. I welcome collaborators.

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[Jacob Sayles]

There is also Nadine which is open source and used here at Office Nomads.  It doesn't do door locks though but Alex Lang from Cobot and I have gone back and forth discussing how to integrate door locks into our systems.  We mostly discussed integrating with ISONAS controllers since that is what we use and I like that they are wired with standard CAT5 with PoE.  It's certainly doable but we haven't had the need so we haven't invested the time.  

More info here:  http://nadineproject.org

Jacob

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[Sam Rosen]

Fellow Coworking Afficianados,

Just wanted to follow-up on this old thread and post an update. 

A couple weeks ago we launched a brand-spankin-new redesigned version of Desktime, which seems to address a lot of the problems I've seen on various threads. Check it out when you have a second! 

The big advancement in this version of Desktime is our Space Management Software, which is far more robust than our previous solution and easy on the eyes to boot. 

While we aren't rocking integration with security system or wifi at this point, we'll be adding new functionality over the coming months. Drop me a line if you wanna know more!

Have a lovely week,

Sam

[Devin]

Very pretty application.

Someone is trying to raise $4k to develop a room booking extension for CiviCRM: http://civicrm.org/make-it-happen#CiviBooking

CiviCRM does so much stuff.  If it can add coworker management functionality to it's long list of tools, it'll be a killer app for coworking spaces.

For those who haven't been following CiviCRM's development: it now lives happily inside a Wordpress install/backend and an appropriately sized server costs about$10/month.

[Jacob Sayles]

Thanks Devin, that's a great tip.  Sam, your app looks beautiful and well thought out.  You should add these to the Coworking Tools section of the wiki.  It's right there on the front page.  I was going to add them for you but I'm not sure what to write to describe them.  Desktime is already in the directory section, but now that it's a tool too it warrants being in both places.  

Jacob

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http://www.officenomads.com -  (206) 323-6500

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[Sam Rosen]

Thanks Jacob, I just added Desktime to the Wiki. We've spent a lot of time working on the app. We've been testing the tool with about 20 spaces over the last year too, so  other than looking beautiful it works great too! 

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[Brendan Alviani]

No discussion would be complete without referencing Nexudus and Cobot.me. They both look very good. i played around with each for a couple hours. I prefer Cobot because it's smooth and more user-friendly, but Nexudus is a fine option. I wanted to try out Desktime, but there was no easy way to demo and I was too lazy to call for one. Will do at some point, though.

Also, it's worth checking out this past discussion about space management software options.

[Adrian Palacios]

Thanks for the words Brendan! It was very motivating when our name appeared in the same sentence as cobot. Nexudus Spaces has come a long way in the last year, the more spaces use it, the more we realize how different, new and original ways of running a coworking space there are. Collecting all these ideas and making them available to everyone as a software is always challenging, but we think we are doing well! :P

I think, on top of what you mentioned, the main difference with Cobot is that we always strived to be a white label for the spaces. This means you can edit every detail of the space's website and any communications with your members. That, plus a great feedback from the spaces using it and a release of new features every week, we think makes Nexudus Spaces a great option to consider.

Cheers!

Adrian - co-founder & Nexuder :)

[Cristina Santamarina]

Sam, congratulations for the close release! Your design is really nice, and you seem to handle most of what's needed - I am very very curious to see how you app works! I didn't find the time to watch a demo in GCUC but I'd love to try it once it is fully functional - when will I be able to click buttons and play around :) ?

Thanks for the mention to Cobot Brendan - it is great to see that someone is pointing to us even before I jump in the conversation. Lately I hear of a lot of new spaces using Cobot that learned about us through users comments in the discussion boards or that saw Cobot visiting other coworking spaces. Referrals prove us that we are on the right track and keep us moving. We send you coblove!

As Adrian said, each space is managed in a very different way - it is hard to be a fit for all and that's why I see a reason for all of us to exist. Last year there were just three options: Nexudus, Nadine, and Cobot. I was looking for software for the coworking space that some friends were starting and fell in love with Cobot at first sight for the same reasons you mentioned - it is smooth and easy to use. I think the main reason behind this is that we run a space ourselves and don't overcomplicate things with additional features that end up being unused - That's why I joined the team, and why everyday I feel so happy and proud of being part of it and help so many spaces. 

Re CiviCRM, I am skeptic about generic CRM and ERP tools being adapted to coworking spaces management - after over 6 years working with workspace software and having tried many of these generic tools, I have lost my faith. Devin have you tried it yourself? What's the added value? I see in their list of features that they have an extensive contact profile and that they can also handle pledges, but they don't seem to handle membership plans, access tracking, resources reservations or automated billing - which are key to coworking software. Being a fit for all when you are a tool made for coworking is hard (we have to develop new features every week to fit the needs of new spaces using Cobot, and sometime we find that there's just no way to be a fit) so fitting the different coworking models when you're not even a tool made for coworking sound like a *very* hard thing. If they can make all this for the 4k$, I guess we will have to try yet another coworking management tool.

Hey this was a long answer - we should all meet afk at some point, this is a hot topic!!

[Devin]

I've used Civi for a lot of things but not for space management.  One day when I have a space...

To quickly address your CiviCRM questions: one important feature is that it works inside a Wordpress site.  It does membership management and automated billing,  It doesn't do access tracking or resource reservations, but I think that's what this extension proposes doing.

CiviCRM isn't a perfect solution for coworking space management right now but I come from the school of thinking that problems don't get solved until there's a free/libre/open-source solution - and I'd put my money on CiviCRM being that solution in the not too distant future.

[Alex Hillman]

Devin,

What payment processors does CiviCRM billing integrate with?

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/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

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[Devin]

There's core support for about 20, including Google Checkout, PayPal and Authorize.net. More here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Payment+Processors

There is also an extension for Stripe.com, which works nicely and is my payment processor of choice.  I think a Dwolla extension is in the works.

[Alex Hillman]

Got it, thanks!

The reason I ask is because so many of the community/group/club management systems I've evaluated in the past do monthly invoicing but don't auto-debit (or if they do, they're pretty terrible at everything else). It looks like some of the pay gateway options that CiviCRM supports allows for auto-debit, which is good news.

We're at the tail end of a migration from our old billing system and it's one of those things that I wish we'd done a few years ago. Doing it at the scale of hundreds of members has been one of the most time consuming processes I've ever been through. Necessary, but ouch.

-Alex

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/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Jerome Chang]

Our system can schedule in the future, auto-payments to credit cards on file.  This is ideal for plans that just pays, say, $200/mo.

However, they system does not run whatever outstanding balance is on a client's account.  We have to manually enter the amount we want to run on their card, say, 10 days later.  This occurs for plans that not only have a simple $200/mo plan, but also has other incidentals charged to their account: lost key replacement, printing, etc.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Alex Hillman]

Jerome,

Does this mean that every month you need to schedule a new $200/month payment for each member? Or does it do that automatically?

-Alex

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/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Jerome Chang]

No way.  We can schedule out $200/mo for the next 20 years if we want.  So if we had 100 members, and 70 have $200/mo without any incidentals or other random charges, then we're only reviewing the remaining 30 plans to make sure they're properly invoiced/charged.  And out of those 30, for 25 of them we would likely manually enter in $210, or @200.50 or something.  The last 5 would be because they pay by check or cash, or by piles of jolly ranchers in our barter exchange program.  (haha!  of course we don't exchange in jolly ranchers, but wouldn't that be hilarious???)

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Alex Hillman]

That's what I thought!

What's the Jolly Rancher Exchange Rate these days? ;)

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/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Chris Johnson]

You should accept bitcoin 

Chris

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[Cristina Santamarina]

hehe we integrated bitcoins a while ago - maybe we can do Jolly Ranchers if there's a demand, but we'd need to work on how to ship them ;).

Jerome so recurring fees can be automated but you have to manually schedule variable fees, is that right? Saves some time but still some manual work, which system are you using? And Alex - what system are you switching to? I guess we missed IndyHall again :(.

Devin, I hope your free is not as in beer! We love free beer, but also still need to pay our bills. Though we do have an open API and let people play around with Cobot and add any features they want. 

[Jerome Chang]

Correct re:recurring and variable fees.

I use MindBodyOnline.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Adrian Palacios]

oh payment industry...  trading in jolly ranchers would really be so much easier... We started offering variable regular payments about 6 months ago via Direct Debit (sort of ACH). Members sign up online when they join the space and they provide a one off authorization to be charged a variable amount of money a month. This normally includes the price plan charges (this would be your $200 Jerome) plus any outstanding charges for that member. The transactions are slow but much cheaper than a credit card charge, normally less than 1%. This is slightly different that a regular payment, in that you don't set and interval and you could request funds multiple times in the same month if it was required, up to a limit set by the provider. Usually around ¤500, but, in every case, it is always initiated by the space. Members only need to make the initial authorization, so it's quite convenient for both ends of the transaction.

The bad news (and incredibly frustrating for us) is that we haven't yet found a provider in the US able to offer such as streamlined process (call for help goes here). There is PayPal ACH and a couple of promising services we are working with, but nothing allowing to cleanly avoid the process of having to manually process the variable charges at the end of the month (your are no alone on this Jerome)

Alex, if you don't mind me asking, what auto-debit providers does CiviCRM support? Perhaps we have missed a good one!

Adrian

[Alex Hillman]

The US ACH provider that seems to be the "cleanest" is Dwolla, but the entire process is still clunky: you need bank account information, multiple steps of verification, and a bunch of other things. Credit/debit cards are much more readily available, are perceived to be more secure (chargebacks, etc), and offer benefits to the customers (cash back, points, etc). I wonder...is this different outside of the US?

As usual, the barrier is a mix of technical and perception, but either way I find the extra couple of % worth avoiding that pain for our members. At some scale of revenue processing I could see the amount we pay in processing fees becoming painful, but even processing hundreds of members it's not that much for simplicity and peace of mind for business owners and members alike.

As for CiviCRM's support, I could be wrong but http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Payment+Processors seems to have a column called "recurring contributions". I believe that, at least in most cases, that's an auto-debit option.

-Alex

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/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Cristina Santamarina]

I guess whether it is worth to pay a bit more % for automated payments depends on the size of your space, in the end it is a question of saving money vs saving time. Also, as a customer I usually prefer paying with a card or PayPal (when lovely german banks are ok with that!) than with direct debit. The reasons for this is mainly that it is harder to set up and cancel direct debits, fees are high if I pay to a different country, and insurances for credit cards are much better. 

I checked and CiviCRM has Authorize.net and Stripe integrations - these are a couple of our providers and they do allow automated payments - but I am not sure if in this case it is also for different fees per month, there's a yes on those and a yes on PayPal standard as well. As far as I know PayPal requires a confirmation from the payer if you want to debit variable amounts - not automatically deducted - so I find that confusing.

[Adrian Palacios]

Thanks Alex. We offer Dwolla as offsite payment provider (for members to pay their bills online) but I wasn't aware they supported ACH. 

It is indeed a question of perception. Technology, at the end of the day, is a matter of finding the right partner/tool and typing the right code, but if applied in the wrong context, it will just not make things easier. 

Answering your question, in the UK for example, Direct Debit (the closest process to ACH) is widespread. Most people pay subscriptions, utility bills, accommodation, and the like using this method.

Personally, as a payer, I rather use my card, pay there and then, a not have any authorizations laying around. But from the perspective of someone running a space I can see how, given the right transaction volume, those %s add up quickly. So yes, I guess it all depends of the size, the users and how the whole process is implemented and perceived by them... very interesting topic and definitively a lot of food for some lateral thoughts and original solutions...

Adrian

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[Jerome Chang]

We use WePay.com if ACH.  Very cheap.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Adrian Palacios]

Thanks Jerome. I think it was their CTO who said once that his legacy to the World was to get rid of the PayPal pay button . . . I couldn't find much info about their Bank Payments on their website but we'll give them a call and see what can they offer and what's the user's experience when authorizing payments.

Cheers!

Adrian

[Devin]

I'm happy people are paying bills (especially with bitcoin), but I also think there's a limit to how impactful the coworking "movement" can be until a free/libre/open (free as in freedom) space management software solution emerges that many different people and spaces can collaboratively improve upon.

Just my 2 cents. 

[Jacob Sayles]

Oh I guess no coworking software conversation would be complete without me chiming in about Nadine. 

It's more then just having an open source option. We also need a software sugar daddy that will manage the project, coordinate the contributions, and offer support. Nadine has been around for years now but it's lacking these key elements. I keep making the code better for use here at Office Nomads but that's not enough.  

And we use USA ePay. It's cheap and was easy to loosely integrate into Nadine. 

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[Cristina Santamarina]

Nadine is the existing coworking open-source option, but as Jacob says, it needs ongoing work, a project manager, and we all know it is not easy to get these for free. I have seen Nadine and it looks great - but one needs to be technical to get the most out of it.

I guess for tech people having open options is key but don't expect a lot of coworking spaces jumping in and coding features. As I said, Cobot has an open API, but it is very rarely used by other spaces. When they want a new feature, they usually ask us to do it for them. I don't know if the Nadine project has a lot of contributions, though.

[Cristina Santamarina]

Hi all, 

This conversation was inspiring. I have written a blogpost about payment methods and I though you may want to take a look at it. You can find it here.

Cheers!

Cristina