Going Online for our VIPs (Regular Hirers)

As a regular hirer, it's free for you. The cost of the platform is covered by your facility, offset by the extra bookings revenue the platform helps generate.

Room hire fees are set by your community space, not SpacetoCo. They'll let you know directly if pricing changes.

Yes - it’s as easy as using Facebook and doesn’t require any training. There are many groups just like yours using it across NZ, Australia & the UK. There is also plenty of help and support available (from real people) if you need it.

SpacetoCo provides the online booking system and use two secure payment systems to process the monthly payments. If you opt to pay by card, this will be handled by Stripe. Stripe is a fully PCI compliant payment gateway that is trusted and used by Xero, Amazon, Shopify, Zoom and many more.

If you opt to pay by direct debit, this will be handled by GoCardless, which is a secure platform that handles direct debits directly with all New Zealand & Australian banks. It is also used and trusted by Xero and compliant with all NZ and Australian banks.

More info on secure payments is here.

The goal of this process is to make it more efficient for you to book & pay for the space your organisation uses at the centre. After all, you set up your group to build your community - not to do admin. Most committees are ran by volunteers, so we want to give you a small nudge to think about how you can save yourselves time and automate some of the things that people don’t enjoy doing.

Although it can feel a bit nerve wracking to have an automated payment, rather than approving and actioning an invoice, you can still have risk control - but with less human error. If your normal process is to approve invoices before paying them at a committee, can you remember a time when you ever didn’t approve or pay a genuine & correct invoice?

Therefore we think it’s easier to manage the exception when they come up, rather than creating process that isn’t required. You can always query the invoice and have changes made before payment is taken anytime before the 10th of the month, and you can see what is owing online at anytime. This means you can still approve the payment, you just don’t have to make the payment.

Any bank account has the capability to accept direct debit - and the system will make it easy for you to authorise this.

If you’re set up as a regular booker on SpacetoCo the only payment options are direct debit or credit/debit card charge.

We don’t accept the following forms of payment because:

Cheques- will be decommissioned next year in New Zealand.

Cash - it’s a liability and a risk for community spaces to handle cash on the premises. We want to encourage safe and secure payment methods, and save people the time and effort of going back & forth from the bank.

Paying the invoice through a bank transfer (i.e. you make the payment, not an automated direct debit) - The biggest time saver for both bookers and spaces is automating payment collection. If we can create a neat predictable payment collection flow, everyone wins. No-one has to remember to make the payment, no-one has to check the invoice has been paid, no-one has to chase the invoice and no-one has to manually reconcile accounts receivable and accounts payable.