- manage bookings, customers, finances, staff etc.
- handle multiple venues with multiple facilities
- suitable for conference or leisure centres
- also suitable for private members clubs
Read all about it
More than just a room booking system
Conference System is a modern, cloud-based business management system with our latest ERP (enterprise resource planning) engine at its core. This means it can cope with multiple sites in different time zones and tax jurisdictions, with different languages and staff access roles. It includes extensive financial, document and CRM sub-systems, as well as very capable accommodation management tools if required. Or you can simply use it to manage a small leisure or members club.
Function and event management
Conference System is very flexible regarding the type of functions that can be managed, be they in-house or customer/ client events run to bespoke or pre-set formats. Any activity can have up to six classes of participant, each individually priced (if applicable) and number-limited (if required). A configurable aide memoir records a booker’s requirements for table layout, refreshments and entertainment, etc., and any type of in-house event can be published and booked online.
Manage participant sub-bookings
Create and manage participant sub-bookings within any particular facility allocation, each with individual folios. An at-a-glance list of participants displays who is booked to attend, what their class, status and balance is (if payment is applicable), and if they have registered and signed-in. Clicking a participant's listing allows you to track their charges, payments and product orders, and also to generate confirmations, statements and receipts, etc. Sub-bookings can be cancelled, moved or reassigned.
Suitable for sports facilities
Instead of a function room name, a facility could just as easily be labelled 'Swimming Pool' or 'Tennis Court' and then booked for a morning as 'Swimming Sessions' or 'U3A Sessions', etc. The six classes of participant could then be labelled '9:00-9:45 am', '9:45-10:30am' and so on, which could then be configured as being bookable online. Each class (or session) can then have a separate price and maximum number of bookable places if applicable. All this can be done 'out of the box' if required.
Cope with dependant spaces and grouping
Manage facilities/rooms/spaces that can be divided into smaller areas — ‘child’ spaces can be configured as dependant upon ‘parent’ resources, giving warnings if you try to make bookings that clash (e.g. see red booking on diary). Also manage break-out rooms — any number of facility allocations can be grouped together under one booking whereby all transactions appear on each allocation's folio (see bookings right with coloured stars to show linked bookings in the diary view).
Intuitive interfaces
Evolved from decades of web-application design experience, Conference System’s colourful interfaces have been designed to look good and be used intuitively, reducing or even removing training requirements for day-to-day users. Consistent design metaphors and logical colouring have been expertly used to increase productivity, as have speedy date-pickers and drag-and-drop interactions. You'll also be pleased to know that every part of the system is useable on a tablet or smartphone.
Manage product sales
Whether you wish to sell programmes to participants, goggles to swimmers, flowers to event bookers, or merchandise to website bookers, Conference System enables you to configure products and manage orders from request to fulfilment. Default prices can be overridden at any stage, and stock levels (if applicable) can be set to automatically adjust as sales are completed. Although intended for selling physical inventory, services or benefits (e.g. VIP access) can also be entered as products.
Tax accounts system integration
Conference System will handle the financial and taxation side of sales transactions with ease, allowing you to manage the day-to-day side of your customer and client accounts, including deposits, invoices, statements and extensive account reconciliation. However, every accounts department likes to work with a specific accounts and taxation system, so we will adapt Conference System to automatically upload transaction and invoice data to your accounts system as often as is necessary.
Easily customisable for bespoke features
Conference System is inherently scaleable and has been designed from its core for easy modular expansion. So if you need bespoke interfaces, customised reports, unusual records kept, or just minor tweaks here-and-there to suit your organisation's particular way of doing things, this is most definitely the ERP for you. Speedy customisation is a huge strength of Conference System.
At-a-glance useful reports and metrics
See what's really going on with your sales and customer bases. For an ERP to be a properly useful means of informing business strategy, two things have to be done right: (1) detailed data collection, and (2) meaningful data display. Reports need to be succinct, understandable, bang up-to-date and quick to run and view. Conference System provides all this and more thanks to high levels of data recording, skilful elicitation of metrics, and clever yet very simple-to-understand graphs and charts.
Accessible from almost anywhere
Being cloud-based, any number of users can concurrently access the system from any desktop or mobile device with a Wi-Fi or mobile internet connection and a modern browser. The security technologies and design techniques employed are contemporary, and the system is not susceptible to malicious software on your office network. We take care of the specialist hosting hardware which is housed, triple-replicated and backed-up in multiple data-centres ...it's what we do!
Comprehensive financial sub-systems
Using editable core values that you configure, Conference System's algorithms automatically calculate room/space hire charges according to participant numbers or hire periods as appropriate. The system automatically accounts for charges, payments, turnover and various balances (net or gross of tax) in a multitude of reports. Confirmation notes, registration forms, invoices and statements are generated as printable web pages or PDF files which can be downloaded or emailed in an instant.
Create HTML email marketing campaigns
Legitimately send personalised plain or HTML emails to tightly targeted groups of customers, clients or suppliers, avoiding junk folders and maximising delivery (subject to your mailing list being clean and current). Conference System includes an incredibly intuitive drag-and-drop HTML email template creation tool, and our popular customer/client/supplier 'marking' and 'tagging' tools allow granular levels of campaign targeting that have to be seen to be believed.
Customer Relationship Management
Record and manage your company's interactions with current and prospective customers and clients (separately), ensuring that every sales lead is tracked and followed up. 'Initial conversion' tasks are handled separately to 'ongoing retention', and sales staff can be assigned to individual customers or clients in order to track success rates or commission, etc. CRM notes and emails are presented in an easy-to-read communications timeline that can be viewed at the click of a button on CRM reports.
Gift cards and loyalty points
Issue and track gift cards for incentives or presents, and/or loyalty points for redemption according to flexible configuration options. If using a Site System website, purchased gift cards and their transactions are automatically entered into the system. Loyalty points can be set up for automatic accrual upon payments made, and can also be used as part or complete payment for online bookings (the system automatically checks if the customer has points and offers the chance to redeem them).
Accommodation management
Hotel System can be enabled as integral to Conference System, allowing you to manage and financially control hotel or overnight guest accommodation. One client or customer folio could, for example, cover various function suites as well as overnight accommodation for 100 people or more. The system is very capable and adding custom modules for bespoke requirements is relatively straightforward and thus cost-effective.
Digital marketing campaign management
Diary allocations can be flagged for promotion via social media or bulk email, which will automatically create a campaign record with the relevant dates, ready to start planning the campaign content (title, text, hashtags, assets, primary link, etc.) as well as the channels, lead-time and activity level, etc. All campaign records are then listed on a scheduler and tracked by status as each campaign is progressed from initial planning, through authoring and sign-off to scheduling and final publication.
Manage staff shifts and holidays
Allow managers to plan and record staff shifts, holidays and overtime, etc., with various management reports and diaries not only showing who is working and when (by site and department), but also allowing detailed payroll analysis. The system features 'planned shifts' and 'actual/clocked shifts' which can be compared data-wise as well as visually using a unique overlay display. If your clock-in system has a data export or web API, we will probably be able to integrate it with Conference System.
Continual improvement and development
We continually update and expand the system without any need to access our clients' local networks. Changes are instantly seen by all operators without the need to install updates, and bugs are nearly always fixed the same day they are reported. Although Conference System has just been rebuilt from scratch with a new core, it is still a logical development and improvement of everything in previous versions, and it will continue to improve and evolve, just as it has for the last 23 years.
Call us on 01539 536686, or make an enquiry...
Annual Licence Fee
Unlike hotels where the system requirements and usage of one 50-bed hotel will be similar to the next 50-bed hotel, every conference or leisure centre tends to be operationally unique. Thus your annual hosting/licence/support fee will depend on an appraisal of the likely resource demands of your particular organisation. As a rough guide, a UK member's club with six manageable rooms/spaces would incur annual licence fees of around £1,500 +VAT (not including a Site System website).
No setup fees.
No additional maintenance fees.
Telephone or email support is available during normal working hours.
Emergency support is 24/7.