Starting and running a co-working space is indeed a very exciting venture. You get to meet interesting people every day and seek ways to help them balance their work life. According to reports, flexible workspaces are expected to witness a bright future as the number of remote workers will only increase in the post-pandemic world.
In this line of business, you will need to attract new customers, handle conference rooms, meeting rooms, and desk bookings, ensure that your billing is in shape, maintain facilities across locations, and most importantly, keep community members interested.
Owing to the number of complex services co-working spaces provide, the co-working apps you choose will factor in the success of your space. If selecting an all-inclusive management software for your co-working space seems overly challenging, then there is an alternative to consider.
Have it in mind that you could build your own custom solution. A good number of top spaces have built their own co-working management system with integrations and add-ons that particularly cater to their space, as a substitute for out-of-the-box enterprise software.
Before designing a customized platform, you need to know if these apps to be mentioned below won’t work for you, and you should have adequate resources to support and maintain your custom app throughout its life cycle.
Best Apps for Managing a Coworking Space
Mailchimp Online Marketing Platform
Every successful co-working space requires promotion via email campaigns and Mailchimp with its vast capabilities can be of massive help. This app helps to arrange your audience data, marketing channels and makes it very easy to attain your goals faster. Here are things Mailchimp can help you achieve in your co-working space business:
- Send automated welcome emails and onboarding sequences to new members.
- Personalize emails with well-defined addressee details (full name, company, and role.)
- Simplify email marketing and ensure your members and customers get monthly newsletters at once.
- Categorize members and send only precisely targeted messages.
- Activate messages based on real-time user behavior, i.e.: remind company managers when to pay via invoice, track sales and campaign performance in easy to read visual reports, run A/B tests, and customer satisfaction surveys
Coworkify
This is a useful and flexible workspace management system that strives for simplicity and affordability. With many clients all over the world including Yahoo, The Huffington Post, Forbes, and Business Insider, the primary objective of this app is to simplify all the basic features required for a co-working space to function. Some of its basic and efficient features include:
- Meeting room bookings
- Automated invoicing and payment
- Membership plans
- CRM
Cobot
This is well-renowned management software for co-working and flexible spaces featuring 10 different languages. Cobot is based on the principle of helping co-working spaces reach their goals by achieving their everyday tasks and making management easier.
It boasts of flexible plans irrespective of the size of the space. Be it a single office space or multiple large co-working centers, the app offers the same features which include:
- White label customization
- Meeting room booking and management
- Software integrations
- Invoicing
- Automated door lock and access solutions
- Business analytics
HubSpot CRM System
It is well known as one of the favorite CRM solutions chosen by many co-working spaces. Additionally, it helps businesses obtain extensive insights into prospects, automate the tasks you are not inspired by, and close more membership deals faster. The CRM has both paid and free plans and offer some of these benefits:
- Boost your contact records with data from over 20 million businesses automatically.
- Obtain notifications when a prospect opens your email or visits your co-working website.
- View the context for follow-ups with the right leads at the right time.
- Analyze sales pipeline via a clean visual dashboard.
- Obtain reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance.
- Arrange meetings, use live chat, email templates, click-to-call functionality, and more to connect the prospects easily
The Receptionist
Primarily made to function using IPads, this app is surely going to make a good first impression. In a co-working space, the manner you greet and check in your members and guests has a massive impact on the brand image you make, and in this modern digital environment, The Receptionist makes these processes as seamless as possible.
Note that this app is a visitor management tool for your co-working space that helps you simplify, personalize, and automate a vast range of daily check-in processes. You can also easily sign members and guests at the front desk and point them to the appropriate location.
Zapier Automation & Integration Service
In the co-working space market, automation is without a doubt very important especially as location managers have lots of responsibilities. In managing your co-working space, you can use Zapier automation tool to connect applications and services you are using. Here are some benefits of using Zapier:
- Sync new leads with CRM or spreadsheet.
- Easily notify the team about new leads.
- Update new leads with a personal message.
- Easily share content across social media, and so on
- Decide which apps you would like to connect (Hubspot, Slack, Google Sheets, etc.)
andcards Co-working Space Management Software
Just like it was noted above, it is not an easy task to run a modern co-working space. You will be expected to run members catalog, assign membership plans, bill customers on time, promote and sell your products and services, etc. In addition, you will have to build a vibrant community and keep everyone happy. With this app, you can easily see all the perks your co-working space offers. Other benefits of this app include:
- Ensure selected co-working space products and services are available to external customers.
- Keep Services, Benefits, and Events in front of members and let them buy/apply for them in-app.
- Reach out to the community through an exclusive branded channel.
- Run multiple locations smoothly.
- Arrange individual members and company accounts in a Digital Community catalog.
- Streamline meeting room and desk bookings.
- Allow convenient one-click billing and payments for tenants.
- Grant touchless access to doors.
- Manage visitors and speed up guests’ registration at the reception desk.
- Obtain important metrics on booking, payment, billing, member, and other data to recognize trends and make informed decisions, and more
Intercom Conversational Relationship Platform
This is a fully trusted solution many co-working businesses leverage to support their customers. Success in the co-working space market revolves around communication and collaboration. This is why it is so necessary for community managers to stay in touch with members, offer solutions to their issues quickly and ensure they stay contented with the service. Here are some of the ways Intercom helps to achieve all these:
- Initiate proactive conversations with clients that land on your online platform. Reach them via live chat to help sign up for a membership at your space.
- Properly arrange automated campaigns or one-off email, push, and in-app messages based on time or customer behavior to onboard and keep new users, make announcements, enhance technology adoption, up-sell and cross-sell services.
- Establish an encompassing knowledge base for members where they can get answers to all frequently asked questions.
Stripe Online Payment Processing Software
The primary objective of any business including co-working spaces is to generate good revenue. How many hours a week do the space managers spend on collecting payments from members? Regardless of what this number is, you can do better by automating payments. Here are a few ways Stripe can help you achieve this:
- Leverage Stripe to receive payments online the same way members use it in paying for all other products and services they consume (credit card).
- Let’s you charge members for private offices, desks, meeting rooms, and all sorts of additional services you offer.
- Makes invoices online, auto-send them to members, or charges member credit cards directly.
- It isn’t very necessary to have a physical POS terminal
- Create subscriptions to charge members regularly
FreshBooks Accounting Software
It is common when managing a co-working space to handle daunting tasks like invoicing, expanse management, time tracking, and payments. However, with this user-friendly accounting app, you can easily automate those routines and run your space seamlessly. Some of the benefits of FreshBooks include:
- Automate tasks like organizing expenses, tracking time, and following up with clients.
- Entice your clients with sleek estimates and invoices that promote your brand.
- Produce a full picture of the financial status of your co-working business at a glance with double-entry FreshBooks features such as Cost of Goods Sold, General Ledger, Chart of Accounts, Bank Reconciliation, and more
By leveraging some of these apps noted above, you can easily connect all the professional tools you are using to run your coworking space effectively. You might not need all, however, consider the exact ones that will help enhance and grow your productivity.