Hi everyone! I’m Ashley, an editor for CoworkingResources, a digital publication providing news, advice and market insights for the industry. I’m doing some qualitative research on the most popular coworking management tools available. Here is my list so far:
OfficeR&D
KUBE
Coworkify
Essensys
Nexudus
Cobot
Optix
So my questions are: 1) Are there any other major Coworking management software that you would recommend that’s not on this list? And how did you decide on the management tool you use now?
Note: I’m just focused on tools specific to coworking management, not general communication, accounting or marketing tools like Slack or Hubspot.
I have some fairly strong views on this which I’m happy to share with you, and TBH has been validated time and time and again in conversations with coworking spaces.
I suspect I’d breach the forums “don’t sell your own software” rule if I responded publicly and in full to your question - so drop me a note on any of the various platforms if you’d like to chat.
For me the decision came back to one of our ideal integration with my existing contract and direct debit system.
Because Your Desk is a non-US based (Sydney, Australia) coworking space the option to use a platform like stripe to process all payments became prohibitively expensive, and would of added aprox $50,000 AUD in yearly transaction fees to my budget, compared to my preferred system that on charges to clients aprox $5,000 AUD in fees across 47 active members.
In looking at all the platforms I recognised that no one system is he perfect fit for my coworking space, so the deciding factor is what core coworking platform integrated well with the other software solutions I already use day to day.
Sure meeting room bookings and inter office communication features are great, but the ability to collect 80% of the monthly revenue on the 1st of every month via a direct debit system is the no.1 factor that keeps my coworking business healthy and competitive.
That is a great list of software that focus on coworking. I recommend checking out this Big Bodacious list curated by Hector Kolonas. His list has been a pretty good, unbiased resource for us, and it has a few platforms that you may have overlooked. Satellite Deskworks, Habu, and Proximity being the big three, I see missing. There are a ton more on that list, because Hector is thorough, but many of them focus on one piece of the coworking puzzle, whereas, these three are others that encompass almost everything you need to run a space, like the ones you listed above!
Carl, I would love to know what kinds of challenges you were running into that caused your fees to jump so much with Stripe. I haven’t heard of that happening before with the Australian or NZ spaces I’m familiar with!
Itys not that Stripe has unusually high fees (Stripe and Integrapay have the exact same credit card fees), but rather our system (Integrapay) allows for much lower transaction costs on automatic bank transfers.
Stripe is around $3,500 every month in fees, Integrapay (because most people use the bank direct debit feature) is $300 a month.
It was because of this one thing that we based our decision off what major coworking software provider to use, because not all of them supported our software stack.
@carl.r.sullivan do Australian banks support ACH transfers? Stripe (now) supports ACH bank transfers at around 1/10th the fees of credit cards.
The only caveat is the direct debit verification process which is clumsier for smaller payments but def can be worth it for larger transactions! Im hopeful that coworking platforms will support Plaid, which streamlines the verification process for that kind of lower cost transfer and saves spaces boatloads!
Yeah so I believe that when we made the move 18 months ago Stripe didn’t support ACH payments. I cant see any mention of it on stripe.com/au/pricing but it may be a less known feature.
Integrapay on the other hand, for a ACH payment charges $0.33 per transaction regardless of the size, which works well because we have invoices ranging from $100 to $30,000 per client per month.
As for the process, both the system we currently use and its predecessor has a simple 1 page direct debit agreement form that is baked into our membership agreement, its very streamlined now.