SpacetoCo

New payments open new markets

SpacetoCo is a booking management solution for short term space hire in Australia and New Zealand. It connects regular and one-off bookers with venues and sports facilities, and helps those venues to simplify managing thousands of bookings at once.

“It’s a powerful bookings management engine,” said Daniel Franco, Co-founder & Product Manager, SpacetoCo. “We aim to reduce admin by 80% for local government and community organizations who rent out their facilities, by streamlining bookings and helping them handle customer queries.”

Payments automation is pivotal in helping SpacetoCo deliver a major slice of those efficiency savings, particularly the integration of GoCardless for regular monthly payments.

“GoCardess has helped us to completely automate payments for venue hirers that have multiple bookings per week or per month,” said Daniel. “For customers that means a set and forget payment flow, for both them and their own customers.”

Unlocking new markets

Prior to using GoCardless, SpacetoCo could only accept up-front card payments for one-off venue bookings. It wanted to make things easier for regular bookers. These users tend to be community groups or grassroots organisations that need to block-book venues, many of which don’t usually have access to credit or debit cards.

“Introducing a ‘post-pay’ option with Direct Debit from GoCardless instantly unlocked a whole new market for SpacetoCo,” said Francine van den Berg, Onboarding Manager, SpacetoCo. “We now have 500-plus customers offering this payment option to their users.”

The size of that market in terms of end users has proved to be huge, explained Fraser Bullock, Principal Engineer, SpacetoCo.

99.8% payment success

Automating regular payments for venue bookings has seriously increased cashflow and efficiency for both SpacetoCo and its customers.

“We have a 99.8% payment success rate with GoCardless, so customers spend almost no time chasing late payments,” said Teegan Bishop, Customer Success Manager, SpacetoCo. “GoCardless automatically — and almost always successfully — retries failed payments and last month, we only had to chase one outstanding debt across Australia and New Zealand. I could probably count on my hands the bad debts we've ever had to write off.”

A beautiful product

Fraser says that in five years the SpacetoCo development team has barely had to log into GoCardless, and that they also barely had to touch the code during implementation.

“That’s the yardstick for measuring how good a SaaS integration is because, if you’re logging in, it’s because something needs fixing,” said Fraser.

The operational teams have had a similarly easy ride using GoCardless. “It’s so easy to use that we were able to just jump in and work it out for ourselves,” said Francine. “We didn’t need any training.”

“I don't think I've ever seen a bug in the system,” added Teegan.

GoCardless is an international payments platform, so all these operations and processes can be replicated in almost any market around the world. “GoCardless allows us to use a single platform and the same integration to collect payments in Australia and New Zealand,” said Daniel. “And it’ll be the same story when we launch in the UK in 2025. We won’t have to touch it.”

A benefit that money can’t buy 

There’s one final benefit that the SpacetoCo team gets from GoCardless. And it’s one that anyone in the world would welcome.

“GoCardless makes us feel less stressed and more at ease about payments,” said Fraser. “We can trust that it's working away in the background, just as it has for the last five years and just like it will for the next five.”