Online booking, membership management, enquiries: When a custom web solution pays off

Many businesses that come to us with an idea for their own application actually already have a system. It consists of an Excel list, an inbox and a telephone. This works for a surprisingly long time. At some point, though, it costs more time than anyone realises. Whether a custom solution is the answer or a ready-made tool is enough can usually be decided after one conversation.

When a ready-made tool is perfectly fine

For many tasks, there is good software to rent: appointment booking for practices, club management, form builders, reservation systems for accommodation. If your process is standard, few people work with it and no other systems need to be connected, use a tool like that. Custom development would be a waste of money.

Sometimes you do not even need that. Ferienwohnung Madelaine in Weißenbach bei Haus im Ennstal got a one-pager from us that presents the holiday flat. Guests enquire directly through several contact channels. A single holiday flat does not need its own booking platform. PSP Taxi in Traun was also looking for a simple website where people can reach the company quickly. For businesses like these, a clear way to get in touch is the right solution.

How you can tell that standard no longer fits

The limit rarely shows all at once. Usually it is small points of friction that add up:

• The same data is entered twice, for example in the registration list and then in the accounts.

• Several people keep their own copies of the same Excel file. Nobody knows which one is current.

• Every booking leads to three or four emails until the date, invoice and confirmation are right.

• The tool forces you into a process that does not suit your business, so everyone works around it.

• Members, bookings and payments are kept in three different programs.

If you recognise two or three of these points, it is worth taking a closer look. A custom solution pays off where it replaces manual work that comes back every week.

An example: members and seminars in one place

The VÖPP, the Association of Austrian Psychotherapists (Vereinigung Österreichischer Psychotherapeut*innen), was in exactly this situation. Booking seminars and courses was error-prone. There was no central place where member and seminar data was stored.

Using the Laravel framework, we developed a platform that combines both. Members renew their membership and update their profile there themselves. Members and prospective participants book seminars and courses online and pay via the payment provider Stripe. In the admin dashboard, the team creates and edits seminars and has an overview of the member database. Since then, booking has become much simpler. The administration saves the team time.

Smaller, but working on the same principle, is the website of Kinesiologie Fraberger. Clients book an appointment there and pay in the same process. This has made handling payments easier for the practice.

Enquiry funnels: structure instead of free text

A third form of custom solution is often underestimated. A contact form with one large text field delivers enquiries with half the details missing. Then the follow-up questions begin. An enquiry funnel instead asks step by step for what you really need to prepare a quote. Depending on the answer, it shows the right next questions.

In the end, the complete enquiry reaches the right person or goes straight into your system. This is not a large software project. But it does require us to agree beforehand which details you need for your first reply.

Your data, your interfaces

With rented software, your data is held by the provider. That is not automatically bad. But you should know what you can export and what happens if the provider changes prices or terms. With your own solution, the data is in your database. We host it at Hetzner in Germany, within the EU, with automatic backups.

This is a strong argument for member data in particular. Practices also handle health data, which Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation gives special protection. Here you want to know exactly where the data is stored and who has access to it.

Interfaces are the second point. Your own application can pass data to your accounting, your newsletter software or existing industry software, provided these offer an interface. We check this before we send you a quote. If there is none, we tell you openly.

Start small, then expand

A typical mistake with custom solutions is wanting to build everything at once. We start with the process that costs the most time today. For an association, that is often seminar booking, for a practice, scheduling appointments. This first version goes live and your team works with it. Only then do we decide on the next step.

This way you see early on whether the solution proves itself. Your team gets used to the new tool step by step. And features that seemed important at the start sometimes turn out to be unnecessary.

You can find out which other solutions we build under Custom Web Solutions.