# Did some searching, no dice: Venue Management software?



## stolympiakos (Nov 8, 2018)

I manage a fairly active PAC within a school district (so small budget). We book outside rentals fairly frequently to supplement our costs, and staff our facility with student workers and professional staff when needed. In an ideal world, the software I'm looking for would do the following: 


Multi Venue booking (we have three/four spaces in our facility, depending on needs).
Staffing of these events (both volunteer and paid)
database of workers for these events (or them all having access to it)
Production Management Calendar

I got a look at a couple of older threads, and saw ArtsVision, but that's going to be wayyy out of my price range, and it seems the other options in the main threads mentioned only discussed the staff management aspects of this. We run somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 events in an academic year, and being able to keep track of everything needed for this would make my life so much easier. Any thoughts or any homebrew solutions people may be running? I know Google Suite can do a great many things, but I'd like to see what people have come up with .


Thanks everyone!


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## YesItWillWork (Nov 8, 2018)

As you've found there are some software packages that do these kind of things (and a whole lot more) but they tend to very much be at the expensive end of the spectrum. Some of the names that come to mind are ArtsVision, Artifax, Ungerboeck EMBS, and EventPro.

I can't speak to all of your needs but there is a lot of power in Google Suite (particular if you have someone that can write some scripting) if your needs are reasonably simple. For example we use a Google Sheet that I developed for rostering our small team of 7 technicians. Events needing staff are put into the spreadsheet and each person has a column with a colour code system (Available, not available, please do this one, and confirmed). In the background there is a script I wrote that synchronises the confirmed shifts into individual google calendars that are shared to each person so they get the shifts they are confirmed for straight to their phone calendars. This works well for us since we all use google calendar anyway. It also has the option of sending each person an email to notify them of new shifts or details changing though we tend not to use that so much anymore.


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## Ben Stiegler (Nov 9, 2018)

What abt www.virtualcallboard.com. ? I think it’s got those functions!


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## Dionysus (Nov 15, 2018)

Both theatres I work for have been using spreadsheet based solutions for their multiple venues.
One is a national theatre running two venues, 3 rehearsal spaces and its shops.
One is a fair sized community theatre with two venues, 3 rehearsal spaces, shops.

for the community theatre I use google drive, and have a open to view link to the folder holding the schedule spreadsheets. Nothing too complicated and Id love to improve it but I just don't have time to dig into that.
Just looked at virtual call board and it looks pretty good, but not sure how well I can convince the powers that be to switch AGAIN and pay for another service.
Honestly I'd love to switch ticketing services if we could find one that gave us better service for the same price. at least they are local.


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## cnnrward (Nov 21, 2018)

I've been looking into propared, pricing is based on the size of the management team, so that will be the primary factor. It looks to have all the features.


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## StradivariusBone (Aug 5, 2021)

Reviving an old thread with the same question- Currently using an ancient version of EventPro that no longer is supported, but cheapish to maintain. Functionality is degrading from the aforementioned discontinuation of support. Upgrading EventPro seems the logical choice, but certainly not the cheapest.

What are people using for venue management? Looking for something that can maintain a database of clients, generate contracts, schedule bookings, etc. Our district has six venues that would require it.


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## Footer (Aug 6, 2021)

StradivariusBone said:


> Reviving an old thread with the same question- Currently using an ancient version of EventPro that no longer is supported, but cheapish to maintain. Functionality is degrading from the aforementioned discontinuation of support. Upgrading EventPro seems the logical choice, but certainly not the cheapest.
> 
> What are people using for venue management? Looking for something that can maintain a database of clients, generate contracts, schedule bookings, etc. Our district has six venues that would require it.


We're still on excel and a crap ton of google drive folders. It works. There is a component of Artsman Theatre Manager that does it but even though we use that for box office we don't use the management portion.


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## ndp (Aug 6, 2021)

Sounds exactly what we designed and built our website (the "LNLDB") to do. It does a couple neat things - maintains user lists for members of the club and clients and it manages events from the initial request for service all the way to sending the final invoice, among many other varied tasks. There's also a "workorder wizard" which is a full self-service tool for clients to request events. It guides the client through the process and can intelligently suggest what services are required based on past events, selected venue, etc.

It's pretty specialized for our club but I'm sure someone who's moderately good at programming can modify it to fit their needs. It's all open-source and can be found below.








GitHub - WPI-LNL/lnldb: Getting rid of that 12+ y.o. perl mess.

Getting rid of that 12+ y.o. perl mess. Contribute to WPI-LNL/lnldb development by creating an account on GitHub.



github.com











GitHub - WPI-LNL/workorderwizard: Work order wizard for WPI Lens and Lights, written in Typescript/Angular and designed to interface with LNLDB

Work order wizard for WPI Lens and Lights, written in Typescript/Angular and designed to interface with LNLDB - GitHub - WPI-LNL/workorderwizard: Work order wizard for WPI Lens and Lights, written ...



github.com





Development docs are here: https://lnldb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html, and to see and read about the actual site functionality check out here: https://lnldb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help/user-guides.html.

- Nick


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## Jay Ashworth (Dec 15, 2022)

Well... it's been 14 months, and now *I* may need an answer to this question. I *could* write it myself, but I'd have to marry the necessary toolsets for the current generation of software design, and I ain't sure I got it in me anymore. I am picky about design, though, having done it for most of 4 decades. (Ghod, it's weird, being the same age as old people...)

Clients
Events
Facilities (we have a mainstage, 4 studios, a lobby/atrium, and probably our sceneshop; maybe some flypacks; it'd be nice if the system allowed us to group things for entry, or understood that different names could point to the same space -- our dance rooms 3 and 4 can also double as Dressing Rooms 3 and 4, frex)
Crew (some salary, some overhire, as usual)
Equipment (maybe down to the granularity of barcode checkout from the cage)
and whatever else doesn't spring instantly to mind
I believe they have a plan already for ticketing, and hopefully such a package could API over to that, to plug in the newly created events -- and presumably that would do public-facing event calendar for such things are are not private rentals.

Anybody got any recent pointers to such software? Doesn't have to be free; we actually have some budget here...


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## Ben Stiegler (Dec 15, 2022)

Don't worry, Jay ... we may have a lot of tree rings, but I'm pretty confident you and I will never be classified as adults ... and that's a good thing!


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## Jay Ashworth (Dec 15, 2022)

Ben Stiegler said:


> Don't worry, Jay ... we may have a lot of tree rings, but I'm pretty confident you and I will never be classified as adults ... and that's a good thing!


Phew... thank ghod.


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## TimMc (Dec 15, 2022)

You may find it better to write your own in something like FileMaker Pro, Jay.

I've been on a 25 year quest for the perfect rental & show manager software. What "perfect" requires is for my boss to be able to enter relevant data in any order... think "stream of consciousness" style. That never materialized although now AI technologies might be able to parse random data into the correct DB fields...

I mention that because all of the commercial software I'd found required some level of modification to the way we operate our offices, the way our staff is accustomed to working, and it needed to be "packaged gear" and warehouse-friendly. What I found was inflexible software or inflexible personnel; customizing either was terribly expensive. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

There are a number of commercial and share-ware 'asset manager' software packages. Perhaps one of them might be a closer fit today, than when I was looking years ago.


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## Jay Ashworth (Dec 15, 2022)

I may well have to write it myself, but Filemaker wouldn't be the target. I'm sure there *is* some LAMP-stack development target environment I can aim for, I just don't know if I can muster the energy to learn one.


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