Looking for advice re Room Booking Software for a Not for Profit

[Twisties34]

Not sure if this is the right forum to post this in, but hopefully someone can help or direct me elsewhere. This forum came up in my Google search and I'm amazed and a little annoyed I hadn't found it earlier. Looks like a gem of a place.

 

Anyway, on with the question ....

 

I volunteer at a local Community House a couple of days a week, and we have just moved to bigger premises. We had a meeting with the Department of Human Services Victoria yesterday and they now require us as part of our compliance to get some room booking software to be able to track the use of our seperate rooms. We need

 

* Multiple rooms (currently 7)

* Hourly blocks able to be booked

* Colour coded for the use (why the dpt wants this I don't know, just to look pretty?)

* Ability to generate a usage report that will give us the total number of hours booked per room and/or in total

 

Department prefer web based. As it is a not for profit, there is no budget for this. So costs will need to be minimal - free even better.

 

So far I've looked at https://www.classroombookings.com/ and have set up and tested this fine on my own domain. The not for profit does not have FTP access, so I may need to host it for them - which isn't a problem unless it starts to run into space and bandwidth. This app does not fit our needs however as it does not allow for the usage report to be generated. I've spoken with the developer on Twitter and he has suggested https://mrbs.sourceforge.io/. Which I am not familiar with and it seems a little more complicated to install. Hmm ... has anyone used this? Would they recommend it? Or would you recommend something else?

 

The House has a WordPress website and I have been through the majority of the plugins available but none of them seem to fit our needs. Most will only allow you to book appointments, and you can't seem to book multiple appointments per day. Or they are designed for motels/bed breakfast and you can only book per night. Or they are untested and compatibility may be an issue with our version of WordPress.

 

Can anyone make a recommendation or push me towards the right thread?

[howartp]

I'm sure MRBS does all the above.

 

We used it for years, then switched to (paid) http://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk for advanced features.

 

For non-profit I'd stick with MRBS.

 

Peter

Edited June 5, 2019 by howartp

[sted]

if you have gsuite or office 365 they can both do room bookings

[dayzd]

if you have gsuite or office 365 they can both do room bookings

 

Do either do any reporting?

[sted]

Do either do any reporting?

 

not sure ive only set it up to test it so reporting wasnt something i looked into sorry

[Twisties34]

Woot! That was fast. Thnx guys for the quick reply and recommendations. Perhaps we will try the free one for now and see how it goes. The department is offering to help fund if required, but does not have a budget. Now I can come back to the committee with an expected cost and solution

[dayzd]

If it helps, I used version 1 of https://www.classroombookings.com/ in my old job (about 10 years ago, now) and got on well with it.

 

If you desperately need reports from it, I daresay if you've the inclination you could write something that queries the SQL yourself...

[Danp]

We use MRBS for room bookings, I've since added our Chromebooks to it too. I set up a 2nd install of it for our trip mobile phones too.