Key differences between Skedda and SpacetoCo

Both tools can help you save time managing bookings, especially if you're moving from a manual system. However, the key difference is that SpacetoCo is an end-to-end platform and marketplace for community venues. It helps you automate bookings growth and manage bookings, payments, bonds and reporting. While Skedda provides automation for bookings, it requires manual processes or additional software for the other activities.

21-Jun-06-2023-11-34-28-8583-PM

Skedda & SpacetoCo: What is the difference?

Read on for a detailed comparison and videos for how each tool handles venue bookings, payments and communication.

1. Free Bookings

Both tools have free plans for either internal or $0 bookings.  Here's how the plans measure up against each other

 

Skedda

SpacetoCo

Administrators

5

Unlimited

Spaces

5

Unlimited

Custom fields

1

Unlimited

Activity Feed

24 hours

All time

Private Spaces

None

Yes

Space Photos

None

10 per space, plus videos + floorplans

Insights Dashboard

None

Yes

Policy Rules

 None

Yes

Booking data

1 Year

All time

2. Bookings growth

Skedda is a widget that you can embed on your website or standalone page where people book your space.
 
SpacetoCo is a local space finding marketplace. Each bookable space has its own profile page. You can find these pages through Google, on the marketplace, your own website or privately. By participating in an active marketplace, venues grow their bookings and can find people to book less popular times.

3. Advertising and SEO

Skedda does not actively promote venues or help them be found on Google. Venues have to fund their own marketing and SEO optimisation.
 
You don’t need to know anything about Search Engine Optimisation when promoting venues on SpacetoCo - it helps venues rank on Google. Each bookable space at a venue has its own webpage full of rich text and data that helps it rank in search listings. Link these pages to an existing Facebook page or website, or use SpacetoCo’s page as the venue website! SpacetoCo also promotes venues through paid and organic social media and Google Ads to help raise their profile and find new guests.

4. Bookings control

Both tools allow you to take bookings from online users.
 
Skedda automatically accepts all bookings unless you specifically deny a user from making bookings. This means if you don't want to accept a booking, you have to cancel and refund the customer. Refunds are done manually from Stripe, which may incur a charge.
 
On SpacetoCo, you have the control to accept or decline a booking before you take the payment. This means you can evaluate if it's a booking you want, and there is no cost to either the customer or the venue to decline it.

5. Items and charges

Skedda only manages space bookings. If you want to charge for items like projectors or additional services, they’ll have to be 'another space' or managed manually. There are limitations when you manage items and charges as ‘spaces’. Skedda doesn’t not know which items are linked to the booking, or what's permissible for each space. The venue has to manually track which bookings need which items. Otherwise, they refund or cancel both if the booking is cancelled.
 
SpacetoCo allows users to book additional items and charges as part of the booking process. They can be charged hourly or per booking, and you can decide which space they are applicable for. Because items and charges are linked to bookings, they are automatically refunded if the booking is cancelled within the policy set.

6. Payment choice method

Skedda takes payments for cards or allows you to invoice - but you have to choose which method you want for your whole venue.
 
SpacetoCo allows you to take casual bookings by upfront card payment and invoice your regular/higher value customers for post payment. This means you can choose the right payment method for different customers and their organisations.

7. Refunds and changes

If a customer pays upfront on Skedda, they have no option to cancel themselves and get a refund. The venue would need to cancel the booking, go into the payment system and manually refund the booking.
 
On SpacetoCo, the customer can self-cancel and receive a refund. The venue can also cancel and refund a booking with a couple of clicks, with no need to manually go into a payment system or bank account.

8. Security bonds

Skedda has no ability to take security bonds as part of a booking. The venue would have to handle this manually (e.g. the user would need to fill out a form, send payment). The venue would need to return the bond after each booking and manage the liability of holding this cash.
 
SpacetoCo allows you to schedule a bond with an amount of your choice on any casual booking. This means the customer has an amount held on their card 4 days before the booking starts. SpacetoCo removes this bond automatically, 3 days after the booking (unless a claim is made). It's a completely cashless bond system that requires no manual back & forth moving of money.

9. Reconciliation

Skedda is not a reconciliation tool. All invoicing and payments need to be managed in the venues’ accounting software. This either means reconciling payouts from Stripe or matching payments to invoices. The outstanding debtors need to be chased by the venue. If the venue takes payment upfront for bookings, this is a liability that needs to be managed by the venue. For example, if a venue takes a $100 payment for a kids birthday party that will happen in 6 months time, the venue cannot spend this $100 in their bank account until after the event has occurred, as it could be refunded if the customer cancels.
 
SpacetoCo handles all the payment collection and debtor management. SpacetoCo pays the venue one lump sum each month that is fully reconciled back to each booking. This means venues can spend all the money it receives without worrying if it needs to be refunded. It also means that the venue handles just 12 transactions for bookings revenue each year. SpacetoCo's reporting also tells the venue how much GST they have collected.
Reconciliation
Managing cashflow

10. Invoicing

Skedda allows you to connect your account to a number of invoicing tools like Xero using another tool called Zapier. This means the booking information is in Skedda and the debtor management is in another system. The initiation of the invoice is straightforward as you can send the details to Xero for it to create an invoice. But if any of the bookings change, are cancelled or need extra items, the venue needs to do this manually in the accounting system. There is no single source of truth for bookings and debtor management - you have to remember to update each system when changes happen.
 
SpacetoCo is an end to end bookings and payments system. The bookings, payments and debtors are all managed in the same system. This means that when changes happen on the booking, the invoicing is automatically updated. SpacetoCo automatically sends an accurate bookings summary and invoice to the customer each month at the same time. Staff don’t need to manage this process.

11. Payment collection

Skedda does not automatically collect payments for invoices. The venue has to chase payment and then mark the invoice as paid.
 
SpacetoCo automatically charges a payment card, or direct debits payment for each invoice. SpacetoCo also sends reminders if it can’t collect payment on the first try, and the team contacts the customer to arrange payment. This means the venue doesn't need to handle these awkward conversations.

12. Customer communication

Skedda has some automated emails that let customers know about their booking. However, all other communication with the customer needs to be done in email. This means there is no single record for dialogue between the venue and the customer as this will be spread across multiple email threads, staff members and email accounts. Skedda has no way to communicate with users through the tool.
 
SpacetoCo has a native messaging system. This means that there is a single searchable record of all bookings communication between the venue and the customer. SpacetoCo allows you to send announcements to a cohort of your customers e.g. all people with bookings after a certain date.
Customer communications
Email notifications

13. Managing bookings

Skedda allows you to see your bookings in a calendar view and you can sync this to a calendar app like Google, Apple or Outlook. However, you cannot search or filter for bookings.
 
SpacetoCo also allows you to see your bookings in a calendar view and can sync to all calendar tools through iCal links. It also allows you to Super Search all your bookings e.g. by customer, space or status. SpacetoCo also allows you to set custom bookings tags so that you can easily filter bookings in a way that's meaningful to your organisation. For example, you can tag all bookings that have alcohol or require cleaning afterwards.
 
SpacetoCo also allows you to tag team members in a booking, write internal notes and staff can 'follow' a booking to be notified of changes.
Managing Bookings

14. Booking slots

Booking slots-1
Skedda and SpacetoCo both allow you to set up complex spaces (e.g. A large space that can be split into 2).
 
SpacetoCo also allows you to create spaces that have multiples of availability. For example, if you have a room with 10 hot desks, you can set up one space and allow 10 desks within this space to be booked. On Skedda, each desk would need to be managed as its own space, creating a complicated booking experience.

15. Reporting and dashboards

Skedda has a dashboard showing a variety of data points. However, you can’t customise or extract data extensively.
 
SpacetoCo has a dashboard that you can customise with a number of data points. It also has a comprehensive reporting suite. You can set up custom reports, extract all your data in a CSV and even schedule reports to be emailed to management. SpacetoCo also compiles a suite of monthly reports including breakdowns of regular vs. casual hire, GST and reconciliation.

16. Customer support

Both Skedda and SpacetoCo have email and chat support for venues and have comprehensive documentation for how they work.
 
However, Skedda does not provide customer support for hirers. As a marketplace, SpacetoCo provides the same high quality support to both hirers and venues. This means we handle many of the small technical enquiries from your customers that can take up a lot of time. SpacetoCo also provides FREE onboarding support from our local team to help you transition your bookings online.

17. Booking questions

Skedda allows you to collect information as part of the booking process. However, you can't report on this information across all bookings.
 
SpacetoCo allows you to set up to 32 questions and you can extract the answers given in reporting and dashboards. For example, if you are collecting ethnographic data or monitoring booking reasons, you can export this data across all bookings.
Booking questions-2

18. Resources

Skedda has blog articles for all sorts of organisations that have spaces to share. They specialise in large corporate workplace management (e.g. big buildings that have lots of meeting rooms, desks and spaces to be managed).
 
SpacetoCo provides blogs, guides, online training and free monthly learning webinars for community venues. Our mission is to make it easier for people to create communities in local spaces. We're experts in community venues like halls, centres, theatres and sports clubs and care about creating local bookable ecosystems so people can do more together. We specialise in affordable, local community and council venues.

The true cost of using Skedda

It all adds up!

For larger revenue venues, SpacetoCo’s commission model can appear to be more expensive. However, this does not take into account the time costs of using a much more manual tool like Skedda that doesn’t have integrated payments and debtor management.
 
We calculated an additional $922 a month in time costs for an average venue to manage their bookings.
 
The true cost of Skedda is higher due to the time costs on staff for manual processing and potential additional spend on marketing an extra tools like Zapier to make the integration work.
 
 

Comparison & time costs of booking and payment management tasks 

The below tables show our analysis on the typical additional time taken for monthly booking management tasks for SpacetoCo vs Skedda. We’ve used an average sized centre to inform the assumptions made for volumes of tasks. You can see these assumptions below or download the comparison tool to enter your own data.

 

Task How the tasks differ Unit Time on SpacetoCo Cost Time on Skedda Cost Additional Cost to Use Skedda
Declining Bookings

SpacetoCo: Decline in one click.

Skedda: Cancel the booking in Skedda. Find and refund payment manually in Stripe. Email customer to explain decline & refund.

 Minute per declined booking 0.5 $1 15 $19

 

$18

 

 

 

Cancelled Bookings

 

SpacetoCo: Customer or venue can cancel in two clicks.


Skedda: Venue cancel the booking in Skedda. Find and refund payment manually in Stripe. Email customer to explain cancel & refund.

 

 

Minute per cancelled booking

 

 

0.5

 

 

$4

 

 

15

 

 

$125

 

 

$121

 

 

Add & return a bond

 

SpacetoCo: Add a bond in one click.


Skedda: Collect bond information, email for payment, check payment, return payment, email confirming return

 

 

Minute per booking with a bond

 

 

0.5

 

 

$4

 

 

30

 

 

$213

 

 

$208

 

 

Items & charges

 

SpacetoCo: Customer can pay for items & charges as part of booking.


Skedda: Venue needs to charge & receipt manually for items and charges.

 

 

Minute per booking with an additional item or charge

 

 

0

 

 

$0

 

 

10

 

 

$133

 

 

$133

 

 

Invoicing

 

SpacetoCo: Automatically creates and sends invoice.


Skedda: Check & amend invoices in accounting software.

 

 

Minute per invoice

 

 

0

 

 

$0

 

 

15

 

 

$106

 

 

$106

 

 

Payment collection

 

SpacetoCo: Automatically collects payment and chases.


Skedda: Unpaid invoices need to be chased by venue and debtors managed in accounting system.

 

 

Minute per invoice

 

 

0

 

 

$0

 

 

10

 

 

$71

 

 

$71

 

 

Payment reconciliation

 

SpacetoCo: One transaction per month to reconcile.

Skedda: All transactions need to be reconciled in accounting system and updated on Skedda for payment status.

 

 

Minute per month (only one transaction)

 

 

5

 

 

$2

 

 

10

 

 

$146

 

 

$144

 

 

Reporting

 

SpacetoCo: Configure and schedule reports to be sent to management automatically.


Skedda: Manually extract data, compile and send reports each month.

 

 

Minute per report

 

 

0

 

 

$0

 

 

30

 

 

$13

 

 

$13

 

 

Messaging & Host Announcements

 

SpacetoCo: All bookings communication searchable and traceable by customer. Quickly segment & broadcast messages to affected customers.


Skedda: All bookings communication in email and no ability to segment customers by bookings.

 

 

Minute per mass communication

 

 

5

 

 

 

$8

 

 

20

 

 

$33

 

 

$25

 

 

Customer Support

 

SpacetoCo: Handles basic hirer support requests.


Skedda: Venue to handle and resolve all customer support requests.

 

 

Minute per support request

 

 

0

 

 

$0

 

 

20

 

 

$83

 

 

$83
           

 

Total Additional Time Cost per Month

 

$922

 

Venue assumptions

We took the average bookings and payments data for a venue that takes about $50K annual bookings revenue. This is based on actual data collected from venues using SpacetoCo.

Venue assumptions Per month
Revenue per month $3,800
Bookings per month 160
Number of cancellations 20
Number of declines 3
Number of bookings with additional items and charges 32
Number of invoices 17
Number of bonds 20
Number of payment transactions 35
Hourly cost of staff $25
Mass emails hirers 4
Reports per month 1
Support requests per month 10

 

DSC05758

Download the time comparison model tool

The analysis above can be customised for your venue to help you understand the true cost of each system. If you would like to get an editable version to make your own calculations, click the button to get a copy! 👉

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How do SpacetoCo and Skedda compare on pricing? 

Skedda has free, pro and integration pricing. SpacetoCo charges a % fee of all bookings revenue that we process. For free venues, all SpacetoCo's features are free and unlimited.
 
For larger revenue venues, SpacetoCo's fees will be higher than Skedda's fixed price fees. However, it's important to calculate the true cost of choosing a platform that has less task automation and how this will cost more in time, rather than fees.
 
The SpacetoCo commission model has many benefits to venues.
  • There are no upfront costs to budget for, it's pay as you go.
  • Because SpacetoCo takes a % of fees - we're invested in your growth too! This is why after you choose to use SpacetoCo, our team will feel part of your team and we actively promote your venues and guide you in how you can further grow bookings and decrease admin.
  • If your venue experiences closures and can't take bookings, then you'll pay no fees. During the pandemic, venues on SpacetoCo paid no fees but retained all the SpacetoCo functionality. On Skedda, you'll pay the fees whether you're earning revenue or not.

Full feature comparison

The below table shows a side by side comparison of SpacetoCo and Skedda's features.

Features SpacetoCo Skedda
Marketplace
List on public marketplace Yes No
Webpage per space Yes No
Photos/Videos Yes Limited
Profile page Yes No
SEO boost Yes No
Social sharing Yes No
Optimised for mobile Yes Yes
Reviews Yes No
Bulk Edit Yes No
Sort spaces Yes No
Casual Bookings
One Click Accept Yes No
Decline bookings Yes No
Guest trust report Yes No
Booking slots Yes No
Edit casual bookings Yes Yes - but not for upfront payments
Refund rules Yes Yes - but not for upfront payments
T&Cs Yes Yes
Social login Yes Yes
Discount codes Yes No
Internal Bookings
Internal bookings Yes Yes
Regular Hirers
Regular hirers Yes Sort of
Pay upfront Yes One or the other
Pay monthly Yes One or the other
Bulk booking creation Yes Limited
Bulk cancellation Yes Yes
Bulk edit Yes Yes
Exclude public & school holidays Yes Partial
Custom fees Yes Yes
Extras
Charge for extras Yes No
Timed extras Yes No
Mandatory extras Yes No
Availability
Online calendar Yes Yes
Live availability Yes Yes
Filter Yes No
Super search Yes No
Conflict warnings Yes No
iCal Yes Yes
Parent Child Yes Yes
Outlook Yes Yes
Day/overnight Yes No
Tags Yes No
Watch bookings Yes No
Check In No Yes
Payments
Take credit/debit card Yes Yes
Automated receipts Yes Yes
Automated refunds Yes No
Payment collection Yes No
PCI complaint Yes Yes
Payment of funds Yes No
Direct debit Yes No
Automated invoicing Yes No
Payment & reconciliation Yes No
Communication
Automated emails Yes Yes
Messages Yes No
Attachments Yes No
Notification preferences Yes Limited
Tag internal users Yes No
Announcements Yes No
AI support Yes No
Reports
Host Dashboard Yes Yes
Guest Dashboard Yes No
Reports Yes Yes
Self Service
Self service bookings Yes Yes
Self service cancellation Yes Yes
Self service changes Yes Yes
Download receipts Yes No
Bonds
Pre event bonds Yes No
Post event bonds Yes No
Team & Customer Management
Booking Notes Yes No
Customer profiles Yes No
User accounts Yes Yes
User switching Yes Limited
Help & Support
Live chat Yes Yes
Guest support Yes No
Training & rollout Yes No

 

Why this rehearsal venue in Auckland moved from Skedda to SpacetoCo

Kete Aronui explain why it was the right decision to invest in a more comprehensive bookings and payments system for their busy venue.

Book a chat with one of our local team to set up a demo and see how SpacetoCo can work for your venue

One of our friendly team will help answer your questions and give you a guided tour of all the time saving features we've built to help make managing regular hire bookings a doddle.

Want to talk to someone now?

Call us on +61 08 6102 1191 +64 22 508 5700 or click the chat icon on the bottom right of our website. 

 

We've got heaps more free resources, guides and training for community venues...

 

Take me to all the guides!
Free digital marketing and online skills course for community venues
how to move to an online venue booking system
How to turn your sports club into a thriving community hub
How to grow your community venue