Bookings management software
Jacinta Richardson
I have a question for those on the list who run publicly enrolable courses. How
do you handle your bookings?
At the moment we use a combination of nms-formmail, RT, LaTeX, a wiki and
memory. It works but is time consuming. I've done a few web searches but I
haven't found any course booking software which matches what I'm looking for
which has:
* automatic invoice generation (which I can then edit if I want before
printing)
* automatic cover letter and email generation (again editable)
* various status levels: entered into accounting software, paid,
processed, payment reminder sent...
* attendance lists
* book lists (we give out free books as part of our early bird)
* customisable reports; particularly ones which estimate course
profitability, and ones which can be used as reminders to print course
manuals, order books, confirm facilities etc.
etc. I'm considering writing my own as a good way to learn either Jifty or
Catalyst, but I thought I'd ask to see if anyone on here had a working solution
already. It doesn't have to do everything, as long as I can customise it.
Failing that, what would you like to see in such a tool?
Jacinta
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Michael R. Wolf
I'm on the board of a local SIG of the ACM. I moved some of the "member
data" from Excel to Access (guess that was a step in the right direction)
before realizing that I was heading down the trail of reinventing a whole
suite of member management tools. As I'm looking around, I'm noticing that
a lot of the features in tools that we are *not* interested in would be
helpful for what you *are* interested in. Here's the kinds of things that
"groups" (e.g. church groups, gyms, professional associations, etc.) have to
do to maintain their "membership". Although you're coming at it from a
"business" perspective and might be tempted to look at "customer
relationship management" tools (CRM floods the market), looking at it from
an "event management" perspective may help you:
- event calendars
- member profile management
- online registration and payment
- automatic email notifications (date- and finance-based)
- reports sliced every way to Sunday
- ID badges (name tags)
- group email (for many definitions of 'group')
- web-hosted or PC-based (we want collaboration on hosted, but you may be
OK with pc-based)
- TODO lists
- non-member contacts (conference halls, hotels, etc..)
- discussion forums
- newsletter distribution
- document downloading
- mail-merge
What synchronicity... The president and I are meeting to discuss this kind
of software in about 2 hours, so I have some fresh in my brain. Do a search
for "event management software" or "group/club management software". We're
looking at companies like memberize.com, regonline.com, clubexpress.com,
irm-systems.com.
I'm only about 2 hours into the research, so YMMV. Also, there is a huge
cost spread. I just called a company who has an entry price of $125,000!
Their web page looked very similar to a $5 per member per year site. I'm
looking to see if our grassroots solution could be replicated in other SIG's
around the world, but he's got a top-down approach and I've got a bottom-up
budget.
When we've done online registrations in the past, we had options of paying a
percentage of the fee or a flat rate per registrant. When we did the math,
the break even was at about 100 conferees.
Also, watch out for their target group size. We tried a disasterous
software package for our most recent tutorial. The politics were the
deciding factor there; she pushed it through, said she'd shepherd it, then
vanished. It was release 1.0. Enough said? The 1.0 issues aside, we found
out that it was more tuned to a large conference with a dedicated, central
contact person who knew the software (i.e. a power user). There are other
tools that are more tuned to collaboration and "baby speak".
Let us know how your searching goes. I'll report back, too, if I find that
this genre of software may be useful.
--
Michael R. Wolf
Michae...@att.net
**NOTE** new, shorter spelling of obsolescent MichaelRunningWolf-at-att.net
Gabor Szabo
Have you considered looking at ACT?
http://news.perl-foundation.org/2007/01/a_conference_toolkit_act_goes.html
While it was originally developed for organizing YAPCs it might be further
developed to do what you need as well.
Gabor
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Gabor Szabo
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Perl Training in Israel http://www.pti.co.il/
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