01
Live capacity per session
Availability is checked again at checkout, so if someone takes the last place while you are deciding, you get told rather than double-booked.
Beanz Barn
Over 8,000 bookings through a system we wrote.
Sessions, parties, vouchers and events for a soft play centre — with the capacity maths done properly.
What it is
Booking is easy. Capacity is the hard part.
Anyone can take a payment. The difficult bit is knowing how many places a booking actually consumes, and never selling the last one twice.
A party of thirteen children is not thirteen places. Each child brings an included adult, the birthday child brings one more, and the real number is twenty-seven. Before we fixed it, parties were holding roughly half the space they needed. That is the sort of thing that only surfaces when you run the system rather than hand it over.
It is on version 3.6, it has handled more than 8,000 bookings, and we are still shipping to it.
The detail
What is actually in it.
02
Pricing that follows the school holidays
Peak and off-peak worked out from the actual term calendar, and applied to parties the same way it is applied to admissions.
03
Parties that size themselves
Included adults calculated from the child count, with chargeable extras on top, and the total shown live as the numbers are typed.
04
Vouchers and add-on events
Gift vouchers, plus optional extras like Santa visits and craft sessions with their own separate capacity.
05
A portal and a door screen
Customers reschedule themselves; staff check people in on arrival.
Still running it
Version 3.6 is the interesting number.
Not the launch. What a booking system looks like after it has been carrying a real business for a while.
A booking system is not finished when it takes its first payment. It is finished when it has survived a full year of the business it belongs to, and a soft play centre has a very particular year: term time is quiet, half terms are not, and the pricing has to follow the school calendar rather than the month.
Most of what version 3.6 contains came from that. The party sizing was wrong in a way nobody could have specified in advance, because the mistake only appears when real parties are booked against real capacity. Vouchers arrived because people wanted to buy them at Christmas. Separate capacity for add-on events arrived because a Santa visit does not consume a soft play place.
That is the argument for staying involved rather than handing over and leaving. The people who wrote it are the people who see what it does in August, and the fix goes in the same week rather than into a backlog somewhere.
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The stack.
A WordPress plugin on version 3.6, integrated with WooCommerce and its Store API. Written by OYNK and still maintained by us.
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