Your building is a tree of bookable spaces, and each one carries its own rate card, calendar and photos. Discounts, packages, insurance and payment settings are written once at the building and apply in every room. Behind that sits the rest of the job: the quote, the agreement, the invoice and the settlement.
Four steps from an empty record to money in the bank
Then add the rooms inside it. Each space keeps its own capacity, square footage, features, photos, seating layout and calendar.
Hourly rates per time block, weekday and weekend, plus packages, discounts, insurance, fees and a deposit rule. Rooms inherit and override.
The venue appears in the public directory with filters, a map pin, an affordability badge and a costed quote builder renters drive themselves.
Quote, deposit, agreement, numbered invoice, payment, and a settlement that says exactly what each party is owed.
A building holds any number of spaces, and a space can hold spaces of its own. Every one of them is a real record with its own capacity, feature list, images, seating chart, price list and calendar. Bookings roll upward: a date in Studio B shows on Studio B, on the building, and in the building's availability grid, entered once.
The one that catches people out: deleting a package from a room does not remove it if the building still offers it. Remove it upstairs, or override it downstairs.
Riverside Works
ActiveDiscounts · Packages · Insurance · Payments — set here, used everywhere
Own hourly rates · inherits everything else
Overrides: rates, insurance
Inherits the building's card in full
Deleting a building soft-deletes the rooms inside it, so a venue never leaves orphaned spaces behind.
Hours are not all worth the same, and a Saturday is not a Tuesday. The rate card says so.
Main Hall — hourly rates
Four time blocks ship by default. Rename, retime, reorder, add or delete them.
| Block | Hours | Weekday | Weekend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morning | 06:00–12:00 | $100 | $120 |
| Afternoon | 12:00–17:00 | $125 | $150 |
| Evening | 17:00–22:00 | $175 | $210 |
| Late Night | 22:00–02:00 | $200 | $240 |
The weekend column here was produced from the weekday column with a single 20% markup, applied to every block plus the half-day and full-day rates.
A 16:00–22:00 booking is one hour of Afternoon and five of Evening, each billed at its own rate. Nobody has to work out where the boundary fell.
Set half-day and full-day flat rates and the quote collapses to one Full Day line the moment the hourly total would beat it. A renter is never charged more than a day rate for one day.
Two hours by default, yours to change. The same figure normalises your hourly rate into the starting cost used for your affordability badge.
Admins and managers save prices outright. Everyone else submits, and a reviewer sees a before-and-after of exactly which sections moved, then approves, rejects with a reason, or pushes the change down to the rooms they choose.
This is where a venue's real pricing lives, and where spreadsheets fall over. Here is the whole model, in the order the quote applies it.
A named bundle a renter can add to a date: a name, a description, a list of what is in it, a type, a price, a price model and a minimum-hours floor. Types are Technology, Lighting, Sound/Audio, Staffing, Catering, Decor and Other.
Available in: Main Hall, Studio B
Length-based — applies itself
Book N hours or more, take X% off.
Multi-day — applies itself
Book N days or more, take X% off.
Event type — claimed by the renter
Weddings, corporate, private, non-profit, educational, performance, conference, other.
Each discount also declares what it bites on: everything, the room only, packages only, or a named list of packages. That last one is how you run 25% off the lighting package for non-profits without discounting the room.
Rule one
Every qualifying length and multi-day discount is collected, sorted, and exactly one applies: the largest. A long multi-day hire cannot quietly collect two overlapping promotions.
Rule two
Every event-type discount the renter claims is added on top of that one. They are additive, not compounding, so the arithmetic stays explainable at the counter.
Rule three
Discounts are worked out on the room plus its packages, whatever the word "everything" suggests. Percentage fees are taken on the subtotal before discounts, so a discount cannot shrink your cleaning charge.
Studio B, one Saturday, 16:00–22:00, booked by a non-profit that claimed your non-profit rate.
| Line | How it was worked out | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Room hire | 1 h Afternoon at $150 + 5 h Evening at $210, weekend column | $1,200.00 |
| Stage Lighting package | Flat price, added to this date | $300.00 |
| Insurance — $1M tier | Your own tier, chosen for this date | $75.00 |
| Cleaning fee | Required, flat | $125.00 |
| Subtotal | $1,700.00 | |
| Length discount — 10% | 6 hours or more. Your 5%-over-4-hours discount also qualified; only the best automatic one applies | −$150.00 |
| Non-profit rate — 15% | Claimed by the renter, added on top | −$225.00 |
| Total | Both discounts are taken on $1,500 — the room and the package, not the insurance or the fee | $1,325.00 |
| Deposit to confirm — 25% | Percentage of the discounted total | $331.25 |
Every figure is rounded to whole cents as it is created, not at the end, because the card is charged the sum of the lines. Claimed discounts are taken on the renter's word — the editor can mark one as needing verification, but nothing holds the money back while you check.
Publish your own cover tiers — name, coverage, price, one marked recommended — and they sort themselves by coverage. Or accept the renter's own certificate with a minimum coverage you set. Or both. Insurance is chosen per date.
Named fees, each a flat amount or a percentage of the subtotal, each marked required or optional and refundable or not. Required ones land on the quote automatically.
Switch on a deposit and set the percentage — 25% unless you say otherwise. The quote shows the deposit against the discounted total, and the renter can pay just that at checkout if you accept deposits and do not demand payment in full.
Four per venue: take payments online, accept deposits, require payment in full, accept donations at check-in. The editor tells you whether your Stripe account is actually connected, rather than letting you switch on something that cannot work.
Percent off, a fixed amount off, or a package thrown in. Give a code a validity window, a maximum number of uses, a minimum booking value, and limit it to one venue if you want. Renters enter it in the quote builder.
Build the tiers you actually use — days of notice against refund percentage — and they sort from most notice to least. Staff work from it; the public listing does not print the ladder yet.
The public venue directory is a map and a filter set, not a wall of photographs.
Capacity range, price range, price type, city, state, feature tags, distance from a postcode — and a minimum decibel ceiling, so an amplified act can find rooms that will actually take it.
Sprung floors, Marley floors, fly systems, orchestra pits, bus parking, hearing assistance. Plus a 14-item "ideal for" list, from weddings to film shoots to memorials.
The $ / $$ / $$$ glyph is a tertile against comparable venues in your county, falling back to your state and then nationally, and never computed from fewer than four priced venues. Memberships and add-ons are excluded, so a day pass cannot make a theatre look cheap.
Signed-in visitors rate a venue out of ten; reviews arrive pending and publish when you approve them. Public comments are off until you switch them on, and also moderated. Visitors can favourite a venue and come back to it.
Banner and slider at 2:1, list thumbnail at 1:1, page image at 4:5, and a multi-image gallery. Each slot is a named placement, so a photo cropped for the banner is not reused as the thumbnail.
A drag-and-drop floor plan with real dimensions in feet or metres, colour-coded sections, curved or straight rows and tables. Keep several named layouts per room and mark one active.
It is what puts a claimed venue in the marketplace, and paying it is the final step of claiming a venue you manage. Listed venues are written into a venue sitemap nightly. See pricing for current terms.
Website, phone and email taps from your listing are all recorded. Web links route through a redirect that logs the click and appends UTM tags plus a click id to your own URL; phone and email are recorded by a beacon. Each click stores the Google click id, the referrer and the visitor.
Enquiry to settled, with the paperwork each stage produces. Every step is a human clicking a button — nothing bills a renter on your behalf.
A renter picks dates and times on the availability calendar, adds packages and insurance for each date, gives their contact and event details, and reads a live-costed quote before submitting. Setup and cleanup windows count toward both the priced span and the blocked one, so load-in stops being free. Every date is availability-checked before it can be added. Renters who would rather ring you get phone, email and website buttons instead — and a room with no details of its own falls back to the building's, channel by channel.
It gets a number of its own, a validity window of 14 days unless you change it, itemised lines, the discounts that were applied, and a snapshot of your entire rate card as it stood that day. Reprice the room tomorrow and the quote you sent today still says what it said. Sending it emails the renter from your organization's own mail settings, and the quote is only stamped as sent once the email has actually gone.
The renter accepts and pays online through your own Stripe Connect account — the deposit alone, or the whole balance. The checkout is reconciled down to the exact amount owed, so a discount or a part payment is honoured to the cent, and the remaining balance is tracked. Refunds are handled from the quote by your staff only. Availability is re-checked on acceptance, and again at conversion.
Converting the quote creates a date per booked day, carrying the rental window, the guest details, the deposit status and the package and insurance choices, and links the room. From here the booking behaves like any other event date — staffing, front of house and calendars all see it.
Where the two rails meet, honestly. The quote rail and the contract rail are separate. A converted quote puts dates on your calendar; attaching those dates to a contract is a step you take by hand. There is no link back from a contract to the quote that priced it.
A contract gathers one or more events into a deal. It proposes the terms from what your programming and tech staff already recorded on those events — rate basis, hours, tech charge, expected deposit — reads them back as lines like "4 h at $150" and "Tech $85", applies your organization's discount schedule, and totals it. One click writes that proposal to the money ledger, and clicking twice cannot bill anyone twice. Before you send anything out, a readiness list tells you what is still unresolved: a date still pending, sound undecided, an hourly rate with no hours. They are warnings, not blocks.
The right agreement attaches itself by the booking type of the events — internal, partnership and community bookings take your internal agreement, rentals take the external one — and it abstains rather than guessing when the events disagree. Staff fill it in, then invite the counterparty by name and email; they get a signing link good for seven days. The wording is snapshotted into that invite, so a later edit cannot change what the signer was shown. A contract can carry several agreements at once, an artist agreement alongside a technical rider, and shows how many of them are signed. Sign in the app or send a certified envelope with a third-party audit trail; either way one Certificate of Signature comes out the other end.
Signing needs the Signatures & Waivers add-on. How signatures work.
A deposit has three states, not two: agreed, waived — with who waived it, when and why — and nobody has decided. Raise a deposit request and the customer gets a pay page of their own, good for seven days, which you can resend, cancel or mark paid offline. A reminder goes out two days before the link dies, another when it does, then weekly for four weeks.
Invoicing sweeps every outstanding line into one invoice with a gapless number per organization per year — INV-2026-7 — a frozen total, a bill-to captured at issue, and a PDF rendered once from those exact lines and never regenerated. Due in 30 days, with a pay link whose expiry matches the term. Voiding one releases its lines, kills the pay link, and keeps the number so the series stays gapless.
A card payment and a cheque you record by hand run through the same writer, so there is nothing to reconcile afterwards. A part payment splits the line: the part banked becomes its own received row and the rest stays outstanding. The contract shows Expected, Invoiced, Received, Outstanding, Cost and Net, per contract and per event.
Settling a night runs a waterfall — income, extras, overhead, the house nut, then up to four percentage shares — and freezes the inputs and outputs onto a record that cannot be edited. Guarantee-versus-door is handled natively, with the house's top-up shown as its own line. Splits use largest-remainder allocation, so three 33.33% shares of $100.01 do not lose a cent. Re-settling supersedes the old record rather than editing it, and refuses outright if somebody has already been paid. Paying a performer closes their share and emails them; the same maths runs your pre-show estimate and your post-show settlement, so the two cannot disagree.
More on the money side: ticketing and finance.
What syncs, in which direction, and what you stop doing by hand.
A venue or a room can create two Google calendars of its own, internal and public, in the account of the admin who connects them. Creating one backfills it with the bookings you already have. You choose which internal fields ride along in the event body, and changing that selection rebuilds the calendar.
A date booked in a room syncs to that room's calendars, to every building above it, and to your organization's calendars, de-duplicated. Public calendars carry only published, non-private dates. Internal ones carry everything, colour-coded by that room's approval status. Cancel a date and it comes off, rather than sitting there renamed.
Every hour, a job re-sends anything that errored, never synced or went stale. Attaching or detaching a room from a date also clears that room's availability cache and its building's, because a pivot write is silent otherwise. Disconnecting stops the syncing and leaves your Google calendar where it is.
A month at a time, per venue. For each day it shows the bookings, whether the day is full, and the gaps left over.
Switch on external access and another organization can ask for view-level access with a message. You approve or refuse with a reply, and a refusal keeps its reason on record. Access is revocable at any time, and approved organizations join the venue's notification list.
Unclaimed directory venues work differently: there is no owner to ask, so an organization that finds one gets view-level use of it straight away — never ownership, and never on top of a live claim someone else has made.
Tell us how your rooms are priced and we will set the first building up with you. Unclaimed venues are already in the directory, free — claiming one to manage it is an application, then the $20/month listing subscription.