The situation
Community halls, sports centres, and arts venues across the UK run their bookings through a mess of spreadsheets, email chains, and tools like Google Forms that were never designed for the job. Double bookings slip through. Invoices get created manually. Nobody can see what's available without asking someone. And the accounting? Someone copies numbers from one spreadsheet into another at the end of every month.
Commercial booking platforms exist, but they're built for large hospitality chains. They cost £5,000 to £15,000 just to set up, charge US pricing, and don't handle UK tax, VAT, or bank transfers properly. For a community venue turning over £30,000 to £500,000 a year, that's not realistic. So the staff keep working around broken processes. The treasurer keeps reconciling by hand. And every "where's my invoice?" email eats another 15 minutes of someone's day.
The client needed a full booking system that handled room availability, invoicing, payment collection, client self-service, and accounting integration. All in one place. Priced for organisations that watch every pound.
What we built
A complete, production-grade venue booking platform that runs as a subscription service. Each venue gets its own isolated database, set up automatically when they sign up. No shared data. No risk of one venue seeing another's information.
The platform handles the full booking lifecycle. A client visits the venue's website, checks availability through an embedded calendar widget, and submits a booking request. The venue approves it, generates an invoice, and sends a payment link. The client pays through Stripe, PayPal, or bank transfer. The payment clears. The invoice updates. The accounting software syncs automatically.
Venues set their own pricing. Hourly, half-day, full-day, weekend, weekly. Different rates for different groups. A local community group pays one price. A corporate hire pays another. Staff can override any price manually, and the system logs who changed what and why.
Clients get a self-service portal through a magic link sent by email. No password to remember. They can view their bookings, download invoices, pay outstanding balances, accept quotes, and cancel if the venue allows it. That one feature alone eliminates the most common support request every venue deals with.
The accounting integrations connect to Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage. Invoices sync automatically with the correct chart of accounts mapping. Most competitors charge £3,000 to £5,000 to set that up as custom work. Here it's built in.
For larger organisations, the platform supports multiple venues under one account, role-based permissions so a receptionist can manage bookings without seeing payment details, and a digital signage display for lobby screens showing the day's schedule.
The numbers
| Traditional agency | Tyree Digital | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | £167,000 | £15,000 |
| Timeline | 9 months | 5.5 weeks |
| Speed | 1x | 8x faster |
| Saving | £152,000 (91%) |
Every month of earlier launch is a month of revenue the client captures that a traditional build would have missed. At a conservative ramp of £10,000 per month in subscriptions, the 7.5-month head start represents over £160,000 in opportunity value on top of the direct cost saving.
The platform was built across 125 commits with 52,929 lines of production code. It processes real payments, generates real invoices, and syncs with real accounting systems. It is not a prototype.
If this platform were licensed to 50 venues at £199 per month, it would generate £119,400 per year. The entire build cost pays for itself in 46 days of operation at that scale.
What the client owns
A fully self-contained software asset. The code, the database, the integrations, the customer data. Everything sits in their own infrastructure. There is no agency controlling the roadmap, no vendor who can raise prices or shut down, and no per-user licensing fees that grow with success.
The platform is built to run on serverless infrastructure, which means hosting costs scale with actual usage rather than sitting at a fixed monthly rate. At low traffic, the running costs are minimal.
What happens next
Tyree Digital doesn't disappear after launch. A monthly subscription covers hosting, maintenance, security updates, and an allowance of development hours for ongoing improvements. The platform keeps evolving as the business grows. Larger development work beyond the monthly allowance is available on a day-rate basis.
The one area flagged for future investment is expanding the automated test suite, particularly around payment processing and invoice workflows. That represents roughly 60 to 80 hours of work and would strengthen confidence for enterprise sales.