How to integrate flexible room booking systems at your school
What is a room booking system?
A room booking system enables you and your staff to reserve rooms outside of timetabled classes, such as for staff meetings, school clubs and extracurricular activities.
If your school enables external groups to book out rooms after school, such as your school hall, a booking system can facilitate booking and payments for this too.
Benefits of flexible room booking systems
A flexible room booking system supports your school by:
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Automating processes, reducing admin workload and saving your staff time
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Providing leaders and support staff with more control and visibility
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Helping you make the most of your school’s resources
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Preventing scheduling conflicts and double bookings
What is an integrated booking system?
The best room booking software will integrate with your existing school management systems, meaning it can automatically sync with your school planning and timetable.
This prevents errors and double bookings by ensuring an up-to-date timetable is in the booking system, so no one can book a room or resource that is already assigned to a scheduled class.
How to implement a flexible room booking system
Having a flexible and streamlined room booking system is essential to managing your school’s resources effectively – and implementing one will massively reduce the administrative burden on your staff.
Choose software that integrates with your school management system
Choosing a software system that’s designed for schools and integrates with your school management system is a huge time saver.
This enables you to automate otherwise time-consuming manual processes, reducing the likelihood of errors. For example, software that automatically syncs with your timetable saves administrative staff from making manual updates to your room booking system any time there’s a timetable change.
As well as syncing with your timetable, integration with your school management system means coordination with all your rooms, term or semester dates, room closures, teacher cover and class suspensions – saving valuable time for staff.
Proactive communication
Effective and regular communication is essential to support the implementation of a new system.
A flexible and automated room booking system makes this easier than ever, as all bookings can have additional customisable information stored against them, such as a meeting title or room layout – giving you more visibility.
Similarly, your room booking system can send automatic email notifications when rooms are booked, reminders ahead of bookings and if IT support is needed. Because any timetable changes automatically sync to integrated booking systems, automated emails can also be sent when a timetable change conflicts with an existing booking.
Learn from data
When implementing a new system, it’s important you can see what’s working and learn as you go.
A holistic view of room booking statistics at your school gives you a full picture of your school’s room and resource management. A flexible system provides reports that show bookings by user, department and resource, so you know which rooms, resources and times are most popular.
This means you can make data-driven decisions and ensure your school is getting the most out of your resources.
Find a room booking system that works for you
Tes Room Booking is a flexible booking system developed specifically for use in schools. It fully integrates with your school management system, automating time-consuming processes and supporting you to avoid scheduling errors and double bookings.
Our free guide explores how you can integrate Room Booking into your existing systems and start getting more done in less time.